Managed Services for Web Application Acceleration Continue to Produce Immediate Business Impact

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leader in powering video, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, today announced insight gained into the return on investment of its Web Application Acceleration managed services.

By implementing application acceleration through a managed services approach, enterprises can deploy bandwidth-intensive applications in IT environments without sacrificing network performance or compromising broader IT cost-saving initiatives. The approach is designed to lessen the need to invest in additional servers, bandwidth, or application acceleration network equipment to support distributed application usage, reducing up-front capital expenditures as well as the IT staff time needed to deploy and manage the application acceleration implementation. The managed services approach can also help enterprises provide consistent high availability and performance to geographically dispersed end users.

A recently published IDC whitepaper sponsored by Akamai¹ assesses and quantifies the business benefits of Akamai’s Web Application Accelerator solution. Based on the actual results of 12 enterprise customers, including comScore and ETS, the IDC whitepaper reports an average cost savings of $1.8M per optimized application for enterprises using Akamai Web Application Acceleration Services in the first year. The enterprises also experienced an average total return on investment in the first 2.2 months after implementation, and 580 percent ROI based on IT cost savings alone.

Akamai Application Acceleration Services enable enterprises to deploy bandwidth-intensive applications without sacrificing network performance or compromising broader IT cost-saving initiatives. Enterprises select Akamai to meet business requirements without the need for broad-scale datacenter build-outs. The Akamai managed service delivery model provides immediate efficiency gains and cost savings by reducing the need to invest in additional servers, bandwidth, or application acceleration network equipment to support distributed applications. The solution ensures consistent high-availability and application performance to geographically dispersed end users. Additionally, it reduces up-front capital expenditures and IT resources needed to deploy and manage the application acceleration implementation.

"This research provides useful insights into the kinds of business results that are possible with the Akamai Web Application Acceleration service,” said Willie M. Tejada, Vice President Application and Site Acceleration, at Akamai Technologies. "It’s our mission to deliver the performance, scalability and application user experience that our enterprise customers require. We are pleased to see so many of our customers achieve solid business results and rapid ROI from their Akamai investment, and we look forward to continuing to work with them to meet the increasing demands of their businesses.”

Akamai Web Application Acceleration: Driving Business Results for Enterprises

comScore's network, which it uses to collect and compile data from the millions of Internet and mobile research panelists around the world, is a fundamental component of the company's operations. Looking to scale its business to accommodate the growth in Internet traffic and achieve other strategic objectives, comScore needed to increase the traffic into its datacenter by about 10-20 times. Facing the prospect of an expensive and time-consuming infrastructure buildout, comScore instead chose to scale by adopting the Akamai Web Application Accelerator service.

"By adopting Akamai, we were able to scale rapidly without making a huge investment in costly new infrastructure,” said Michael Brown, Executive Vice President, comScore. "With Web Application Accelerator, we can bring new offerings to market faster and we’ve reduced IT operational costs by alleviating the need to purchase servers and the staff required to manage them. Accelerating the performance of our business critical applications has also resulted in increased customer traffic and retention."

ETS offers a number of applications over the Web, including an online essay writing tool targeted to the K–12 market; however, with the applications housed out of one datacenter on the East Coast, users on the West Coast were experiencing serious degradation in application performance. Page refreshes were taking fully twice as long for users on the West Coast as for those on the East Coast, making the tool unacceptably slow.

Without Akamai, ETS would have needed to open a datacenter on the West Coast to address this problem, along with all the expense that would have entailed. ETS estimates it would have cost several hundred thousand dollars just to open a new center and many tens of thousands of dollars per year to manage and maintain it. ETS did not want to go down that path and instead chose to outsource application acceleration to Akamai.

"ETS has been running Web Application Accelerator for more than three years now and has realized numerous benefits,” said Frederick Manno, SR&T Business Technology Director at ETS. "Not only did we save hundreds of thousands of dollars in new data center cost avoidance, but we reduced help desk calls by 90 percent for the online writing application, reduced the amount of administrative personnel time spent on monitoring network locations from 50 to 10, and increased user adoption especially for global users.”

The companies interviewed for the whitepaper used Akamai’s Web Application Accelerator for complex enterprise applications, including extranets, business portals, and supply chain management. IT cost savings were realized in four areas: hardware/software, bandwidth, hosting services, and IT staff. Customers realized the most significant benefits by improving application performance for external users, customers, or partners.

The whitepaper also shows that the Akamai Application Acceleration solution reduces latency by an average of 57 percent, and improved application performance by an average of 144 percent. The solution reduced downtime by an average of 24 percent.

Internal users also improved their utilization of Web Application Accelerator-optimized business applications by 25 percent, generating an average of $487,474 in annual benefits per application. In addition to performance improvements, companies interviewed also realized increased cost savings in the range of $200,000 to $300 million annually, which they directly attributed to Akamai’s Web Application Accelerator.

To download the full Whitepaper, visit http://www.akamai.com/dl/whitepapers/IDC_White_Paper_Determining_ROI_of_WAA.pdf

The Akamai Difference

Akamai^® provides market-leading managed services for powering video, dynamic transactions, and enterprise applications online. Having pioneered the content delivery market one decade ago, Akamai’s services have been adopted by the world’s most recognized brands across diverse industries. The alternative to centralized Web infrastructure, Akamai’s global network of tens of thousands of distributed servers provides the scale, reliability, insight and performance for businesses to succeed online. Akamai has transformed the Internet into a more viable place to inform, entertain, interact, and collaborate. To experience The Akamai Difference, visit www.akamai.com.

¹ IDC White Paper Sponsored by Akamai, Measuring the Return on Investment of Web Application Acceleration Managed Services, Doc # 220102, October 2009