Akamai and Riverbed jointly develop innovative SaaS acceleration solution

Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) and Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD) today introduced the Steelhead Cloud Accelerator, a jointly developed solution that combines Akamai's innovative Internet optimisation technology and market-leading Riverbed wide area network (WAN) optimisation technology to deliver end-to-end optimisation for software as a service (SaaS) applications.

By combining the capabilities of the Akamai Intelligent Platform with the award-winning Riverbed WAN optimisation technology, the companies will provide the industry's first solution to overcome the performance issues introduced by hybrid cloud networks, especially for organisations that need to reduce traffic on backhaul links, and obviate the need for bandwidth upgrades.

The Steelhead Cloud Accelerator is a subscription-based add-on to existing Steelhead appliance deployments and does not require any changes in the way the appliances are deployed nor any changes to the SaaS provider's infrastructure, regardless of where the application or end-users are located, across any combination of physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures.

Enterprises need only to deploy a single instance of the Steelhead Cloud Accelerator for each SaaS application to take advantage of the optimization from the jointly developed solution from Akamai and Riverbed. Steelhead Cloud Accelerator will provide optimisations for SaaS applications Google Apps, Salesforce.com and Microsoft Office 365 [1].

Akamai and Riverbed offerings are already used separately today by more than 17 000 organisations, including many Fortune 500 businesses worldwide. Riverbed WAN optimisation solutions are used by globally connected enterprises to speed data transfers and accelerate the performance for the broadest range of applications businesses care about most. Akamai's globally distributed network of more than 100 000 servers deployed in the cloud provides route, protocol and application layer optimisations for the Internet, and serves anywhere from 15% to 30% of all Web traffic at a given time.

The popularity of cloud-based services is growing within organisations of all sizes. According to Forrester Research [2], the SaaS market itself is expected to be more than $100 billion by 2017.

“While attractive in many ways, the cloud introduces challenges around performance,” said Eric Wolford, Executive Vice-President and General Manager of Products at Riverbed. “To overcome application performance bottlenecks encountered in unpredictable cloud environments, the Steelhead Cloud Accelerator gives organisations global SaaS performance that feels local.”

“Seadrill, a leading offshore deep water drilling company, wanted to take advantage of the economics, ease of management, accessibility and storing space offered by cloud technology and decided to centralise its enterprise applications using cloud computing. However, when employees logged into Office 365 in the mornings, it could take as long as two hours before their mailboxes were fully synchronised and led to bandwidth constraints for other types of traffic due to saturated satellite links, often leaving users frustrated,” said Pal Goran Johansen, Network Engineer, Harris Caprock Communication, a global provider of fully managed communications for remote and harsh environments.

“Having reliable and consistent access to Office 365 was mission-critical for communication and collaboration between its oil rigs, offices and headquarters. After testing the Steelhead Cloud Accelerator, response times with Office 365 dramatically improved and freed bandwidth for other traffic. The results showed that Seadrill employees would see significant benefit, as employees would be more productive and collaborative across its 45 oil rigs in EMEA, South America and North America, as well as its offices across the world.”

“In order to unlock the cost savings promised by cloud services, organisations are seeking ways to make IT infrastructure more elastic by using multiple, geographically dispersed cloud deployments,” said Melanie Posey, Research VP at IDC. “Bandwidth constraints and network latency impact IT infrastructure performance regardless of location - private data centres or public cloud data centres. The Steelhead Cloud Accelerator solution offers organisations using hybrid cloud networks the same level of accelerated application performance previously possible only in the public Internet with Akamai or in private cloud environments with Riverbed.”

“As a global specialist in energy management with operations in more than 100 countries, we have more than 16 000 users that access Salesforce.com, including those employees that process orders and handle customer service. Backhaul Internet connections that route users across the private WAN before accessing the public Internet introduces additional distance, latency and consumes additional bandwidth, making accessing Salesforce.com problematic,” said Lionel Marie, Lead Architect for Global WAN Acceleration at Schneider Electric.

“Overcoming the performance challenges was critical for us to effectively process customer orders and provide excellent customer service. We deployed Steelhead Cloud Accelerator to evaluate the solution from Paris and backhauled to the Salesforce.com data centre in the US and achieved 80% data reduction while utilising six times less bandwidth. The test results are really encouraging and demonstrate that the joint solution from Akamai and Riverbed can avoid a costly bandwidth upgrade and address the performance challenges we are encountering.”

The Riverbed Optimisation System (RiOS) software that powers Steelhead products is activated on the Akamai Intelligent Platform when a customer subscribes to the Steelhead Cloud Accelerator solution. A version of RiOS enhanced to connect with the Steelhead Cloud Accelerator solution is also installed on the customer's Steelhead solution within their own networks. After both instances of RiOS connect, customers can benefit from dramatic performance improvements for a variety of SaaS applications.

“Leveraging existing Riverbed WAN optimisation deployments in corporate networks and the globally distributed Akamai Intelligent Platform for Internet optimisation, organisations can realise immediate value without having to deploy any new hardware,” explained Willie M Tejada, Senior Vice-President and General Manager of the Enterprise Cloud Division at Akamai. “With our joint solution, Riverbed and Akamai are ensuring the best user experience for any application, any user, located anywhere, essentially bringing the cloud closer to the end-user.”

The three SaaS applications initially supported by Steelhead Cloud Accelerator include:

Google Apps

Google Apps brings simple, powerful communication and collaboration tools to organisations of any size so that users can stay connected and work together with ease - all hosted by Google to streamline set-up, minimise maintenance and reduce IT costs.

Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing company, provides a trusted cloud platform and SaaS applications including its flagship CRM solution, which helps more than 100 000 organisations collaborate easily and connect with customers.

Microsoft Office 365

Microsoft delivers the power of cloud productivity by bringing together online versions of its most trusted communication and collaboration products - business-class e-mail, Web conferencing, instant messaging, document collaboration and workflow, all designed to work together seamlessly - with the security, reliability and control organisations of all sizes require, helping to save time, money and free up valued resources.

Availability: Steelhead Cloud Accelerator is expected to be generally available in Q1 2012.