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What's Akamai doing to make Internet a better
experience?
Internet traffic is growing exponentially every year. The number of people
accessing Web are also growing exponentially y-o-y. We believe that to handle
this traffic surge efficiently you need a model in which Internet resources are
decentralized and located close to the end user. This is what we are focused on
doing. We are getting resources close to the end user. This is done by
decentralization of resources. Our servers are located on the edge of the
Internet. There is no need to build a central site. We are also building a
shared infrastructure that gives our clients on demand capacity.
How responsive have customers been to your model?
We have grown 30% y-o-y. But we don't consider this as an exponential
growth. The problem is education. We have to educate customers on benefits of
decentralization. Most of the big websites are our clients but smaller ones are
not. It's only when they have a problem that they come to us.
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| -Harald
Prokop, VP (Engineering), Akamai Technologies |
You mentioned that Akamai is working with tier 1 networks
as well as smaller ISPs helping them handle traffic better and efficiently. How
do you do that?
Akamai servers deliver all media types, including HTML, graphics, downloadable
files, Web application logic, flash, and streaming content. With Akamai serving
this rich content from servers located geographically close to end users,
Akamaized Websites load up to 10 times faster! Akamai's servers download and
cache the content locally within the ISP's data center before serving it to
the ISP's subscribers. This significantly reduces the expenses paid by the ISP
for transit bandwidth, as the same piece of content is never downloaded multiple
times from other ISPs, but rather the locally cached copy is used instead. Thus,
ISPs that co-locate Akamai servers see both enhanced performance and reduced
expenses!
What are the new technologies-applications that Akamai is
currently working on?
We foster a very innovative culture within Akamai and we are working on
several next-generation initiatives. This year we are doing a major push into
application acceleration solutions with our dynamic site accelerator and remote
application accelerator services. These products address critical pain points in
the industry by making B2B and B2C applications high performing and more
reliable. On the Internet as a whole, we are seeing greater adoption of
applications over IP and a greater use of IP for media distribution. Already you
are seeing a huge demand for songs, for example, with Apple iTunes. We believe
you will see sites becoming more dynamic and personalized. We expect to play a
critical role in enabling and accelerating these technological trends.
As the world increasingly goes wireless, what kind of role
can we expect from Akamai to improve the overall wireless experience?
We already deliver a significant amount of wireless content today for a
number of major wireless networks. For instance, we provide mobile media
delivery of video clips for multiple channels for a very large US-based service
provider. These include song video tracks, concert videos, weather report, news,
and sports. As another example, a major sports channel and a major Hollywood
entertainment channel are using our 3GPP platform to deliver video content to a
national wireless carrier network in the US. Besides delivering rich media to
wireless users, we are also seeing exciting opportunities in utilizing our edge
processing capabilities, network breadth and content management tools to deliver
a rich experience for wireless users. For instance, a challenge in delivering
text content is transcoding the HTML pages into WAP pages that are suitable for
display on a wireless device. Here our edge processing technologies such as ESI,
Edge Computing, and Advanced Cache control play a critical role in transforming
and customizing the content at the edge of the Internet to deliver a targeted
experience for the wireless user.
What kind of work is Akamai doing in India?
We are not outsourcing any work here. We don't look at India that way. Our
people here own their work. We are doing a lot of product development out of
India and building new services. We are leveraging our operations here to drive
scalability and operational efficiency across the globe. In fact, we are soon
going to launch our first product developed out of our Bangalore center.
How is India as a market for you?
We have demonstrated that our products and services have a market in India.
We have all big names in India as clients. We expect accelerated growth here
thanks to growing broadband adoption. More and more business is going on line.
People are increasingly using web to shop and do other things.
-Ravi Shekhar Pandey Page(s) 1
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