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The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Akamai Technologies content delivery solutions today power the world's most popular sites. It has been a dramatic turnaround for a company, which was a dotcom darling in its heydays opened with a $234 million IPO before it plummeted during the economic meltdown of 2001.The ever-increasing traffic on the Internet has managed to send the cash registers ringing for Akamai Technologies. We catch up with Harald Prokop, vice president, Akamai technologies on the company's future work on technology and its India plans.
 What's Akamai doing to make Internet a better experience?
Internet traffic is growing exponentially every year. Every business is going online. The number of people accessing Web for things such as shopping and ticketing are also growing. 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. 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.
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 are located at the edges of the Internet near end-users. These 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! Network providers who want to offer this type of enhanced performance to their subscribers simply agree to co-locate Akamai servers in their facilities, often at no cost. In addition, 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 novel 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 higher 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, Apple iTunes. We believe you will see sites become more dynamic and personalized. We expect to play a critical role in enabling and accelerating these technological trends.
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
vadmail@cybermedia.co.in
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