In New Delhi: Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leading provider of cloud optimization services, and Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the IT performance company, today announced their work on a joint offering designed to overcome the application performance bottlenecks facing enterprises that leverage public cloud services.
Todays enterprises are increasingly adopting public cloud computing services to avoid costly infrastructure build out, and to bring efficiency to business models such as software as a service (SaaS). As a result, business applications in the cloud, having once resided within the corporate network, are being accessed over an often unpredictable public Internet. New solutions are required to overcome the performance, availability, scalability and security issues introduced by this hybrid network environment.
"Enterprises are increasingly deploying a mix of both in-house and cloud-based applications, said Joe Skorupa, research vice president, data center transformation, at Gartner. As this shift to hybrid networks occurs, ensuring application performance and end-user productivity is critical, creating a need to integrate access to corporate applications, as well as SaaS, in a single pervasive framework.
Akamai and Riverbed are announcing their intention to develop a joint application acceleration solution for hybrid cloud networks that leverages a combination of Internet optimization and wide area network (WAN) optimization. The planned solution would be designed to accelerate cloud-based applications.
Akamai and Riverbed offerings are already used separately today by more than 13,000 organizations, including by Fortune 500 businesses worldwide. Akamais globally-distributed network of more than 90,000 servers deployed in the cloud provides route, protocol and application layer optimizations for the Internet, and serves roughly 30 percent of all Web traffic. Riverbed has thousands of appliances deployed within enterprise networks providing network, application and storage optimizations for the WAN.
In creating a joint offering, Akamai and Riverbed intend to focus on technology integration designed to solve the new application performance challenges introduced by hybrid cloud networks. Akamai Internet optimization software would be integrated within Riverbed Steelhead appliances with the goal of extending Internet optimizations into enterprise networks, thereby extending Akamais edge from close proximity to the data center to directly within the enterprise.
In addition, Riverbed WAN optimization software would be integrated within Akamai edge servers with the goal of extending WAN optimization into the public cloud, thereby extending Riverbeds edge from the data center to close proximity to cloud data centers.
The rapid move to the cloud presents new opportunities for two industry leaders, Riverbed and Akamai, to create solutions for enterprises to simplify their extension to the cloud while leveraging the infrastructure they already have in place, said Anil Batra, Managing Director, Riverbed. Accelerating software as a service, for example, across a hybrid cloud environment helps businesses increase application adoption. We believe that greater adoption means improved business results, operating and infrastructure savings, and user productivity.
Akamais highly-distributed architecture is close to any public cloud infrastructure and Riverbed Steelhead appliances stretch across thousands of enterprise IT networks from the data center to the branch office and mobile worker, said Willie Tejada, vice president, Application and Site Acceleration, Akamai. The alliance is focused on marrying best-in-class protocol optimizations for maximum acceleration and infrastructure offload. Together, both companies expect to provide a seamless solution with quick time-to-value while leveraging each others existing footprints.
The joint offering is expected to be available early in 2012.
Add new comment