Accelerator offers better speed and performance

Akamai Technologies has improved its managed services offering for accelerating web-based enterprise applications to bring faster integration, greater performance and improved reporting.

New features of the Akamai Web Application Accelerator include a new service level agreement assuring network availability, enhanced pre-fetching capabilities, strategic global deployments, as well as the addition of real-time application performance reporting.

Existing customers will automatically and seamlessly receive all these benefits without any software or hardware upgrades, or at any additional cost, a clear advantage of Akamai's managed service over hardware alternatives.

"The internet cannot support the performance demands of today's business applications," said Tom Leighton, chief scientist at Akamai.

"As enterprise applications increase in value, performance and availability, as well as the accompanying insight and reporting to track and measure performance, become ever more critical.

"Faster and more reliable applications correlate to greater utilisation and adoption, which in turn results in more revenue for e-commerce sites, reduced dependency on physical call centres, and greater efficiency through improved online employee, partner and supplier productivity".

For new customers, Akamai has also announced the availability of pre-defined integrations for the acceleration of SAP, Oracle and IBM WebSphere Portal applications.

These pre-built integrations provide business-to-business customers with even faster return on investment.

Leighton added: "Years of integration experience in accelerating our customers' mission-critical applications, combined with our recent acquisition of Netli, positions Akamai to help enable businesses to more quickly derive value from their Web-based applications.

"Enterprises choose Akamai to not only improve application performance and availability, but to also minimise hardware build-out and maintenance that can delay return on investment".

New enhancements to the Akamai Web Application Accelerator provide customers with the following key benefits.

Faster Application Performance and Increased Application Availability.

Intelligent recursive pre-fetching capabilities and JavaScript parsing increases application performance to end users for complex frame-based, business-to-business applications.

Akamai's global, performance-based SLA now adds 100% network availability.

Strategic platform deployments improve performance for end-users using business-to-business applications in high growth regions including Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Increased Visibility and Performance-based Reporting.

Akamai optimal route selection across the "middle mile" of the internet is reported in real-time via the Akamai customer portal.

Customers can view Akamai paths versus the internet's border gateway protocol (BGP) choices.

Faster, Easier Deployment of Complex Enterprise Applications.

Pre-built, application-specific integrations for SAP, Oracle and IBM.

WebSphere Portal enable customers to leverage Akamai best practices for fast and reliable "out-of-the-box" acceleration of business-to-business applications.

"As businesses realise the benefits of using web-enabled applications to help support global organisations, partners and customers - as well as the performance, efficiency and cost savings that can result - the need to find platforms and solutions that can support these applications outside of the firewall is critical," said Neil Macehiter, Research Director at Macehiter Ward-Dutton, a specialist IT advisory firm.

"Businesses need not only to think about security, but also speed of delivery, reliability and ease of access.

"Properly planned and delivered, these kinds of web-enabled applications can be a major success factor in today's commercial environment".

Akamai's Web Application Accelerator service leverages Akamai's globally deployed platform to deliver consistent, improved application performance for enterprise customers.

Akamai accelerates customers' dynamic web applications using a number of unique techniques including dynamic mapping, route optimisation and connection optimisation technology.

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