Akamai site accelerator doubles Office sales

Akamai Technologies has announced that footwear retailer Office doubled its online sales while using its Dynamic Site Accelerator.

Office has also reduced its hardware costs by 40 per cent and is basing its online business strategy - where online sales will equal 10 per cent of revenue by the close of 2009 - on Akamai.

The Office website went live with Akamai in November 2008.

Paul Doeman, head of e-commerce at Office, said: 'We saw an immediate 20 per cent increase in online orders once we went live with Akamai.

'This suggests that previously customers were, at certain times, leaving our website or were unable to complete a transaction, due to high traffic levels.

He added: 'Akamai also helped us through the Christmas 2008 period, one of our busiest times of the year, with no performance issues or outages and with record transactions and visits to our website.

Office previously relied upon a UK internet service provider (ISP) to host its website and, as a consequence, was limited to a fixed capacity to support it, even during periods of high customer traffic.

In August 2008, the Office website had a major outage due to the volume of visitors responding to a promotional e-mail the company had sent out.

Doeman said: 'With this major outage, we realised our current website hosting and service model was inhibiting our online business and decided to search for an alternative.

'We also wanted to avoid having to make direct purchases in infrastructure or equipment as we didn't want to have to develop an expensive in-house cost centre to support this.

'So we decided to look at content delivery providers and other service-based options.

Having examined various options including a number of CDNs, as well as caching and hosting providers, Office, and Foresite E-Business Solutions - a UK-based e-business consultancy and solutions provider used by Office to manage its website and e-commerce infrastructure - selected Akamai.

Branwell Moffat, projects director at Foresite E-Business Solutions, said: 'Akamai has allowed us to outsource almost the entire website acceleration and delivery package.

'Akamai's monitoring and management tools were superior to the other providers we evaluated and provide us with meaningful information on website utilisation and enable us to effectively manage the Office website.

'In addition, Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator solution allows transactional data to be delivered in real time to site visitors - something that is particularly important for Office as it has a rich media website with content and pricing information updated on an hourly basis.

Third-party tests to determine Akamai's effectiveness show that users in the UK experienced a nearly twofold improvement in website performance while customers in the US had a threefold increase in performance.

In addition, because more than 80 per cent of all requests to the website are now served entirely from the Akamai network, Office has been able to reduce the amount of servers, network infrastructure, and bandwidth required to support its website.

Office plans to use Akamai as the cornerstone of its long-term online growth strategy.

Doeman said: 'We are particularly keen on the way that Akamai is helping many US footwear retailers with online sales kiosks in retail outlets, and we see this as also being part of our longer term strategy.

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