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Akamai's Aqua solution optimizing last mile

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Sharath Kumar
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By Sharath Kumar

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BANGALORE, INDIA: e-commerce revenues in the country have risen to $14 billion with the possibility of even higher earnings in 2013. With this increased growth, the estimated growth of the global B2C e-commerce space will pass $1 trillion in 2012. Of this, 66 per cent of the shoppers use a device while shopping.

Customers are constantly demanding a greater web experience from e-commerce websites. This puts pressure on companies such as Flipkart or Snap Deal to look at newer technologies to address the situation.

In an interaction with CIOL, Bruno Goveas, director of Products for Asia Pacific and Japan, Akamai Technologies, talks about how Akamai's robust server presence is helping the e-commerce business to provide an enhanced and reliable online shopping experience to customers and shoppers. Excerpts:

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CIOL: How is Akamai helping boost e-commerce? How does your infrastructure help support the increasing demand?

Bruno Goveas: Akamai is a key component for e-commerce's success. In a traditional commercial space, there are a lot of things that come into the space. Akamai helps give consumers the key technology platform to enable them to offer services at a high level, online. Scale, security, availability and deliverability, are taken care of by Akamai, as well as building of platforms for the client.

CIOL: What do you think is your most important deliverable? Is it analytics or optimization?

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BG: We have analytics, but that's not what we do. If a shoe company is a client, when users go to the site to browse, Akamai ensures that the site and products load perfectly and are presented correctly and without glitches to the consumer. Our business is about intelligence optimization to ensure good delivery.

Akamai funnels all of the data back to the e-commerce company to help them make better decisions. For e.g., a lot of company A's users use Android devices to access A's site, so maybe, A should develop its Android platform further. This data is shared with the advertising partner who uses it to leverage the company effectively.

CIOL: Tell us about Akamai's server presence in India?

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BG: The Internet is a network of networks. In India, you have Reliance, Bharti, VSNL, Sify, etc., who are service providers connecting to form the Internet in India. If one wants reliable transactions, Akamai can assist by having servers in all the ISP data centers. An algorithm developed in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which maintains a real-time map of the Internet, along with the traffic. Akamai knows the best possible path at any given time to get from A to B online.

 

CIOL: How long has it taken this infrastructure to be built?

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BG: Globally, Akamai has 127,000 servers in 80 countries and 2,000 networks. Our value proposition is that we are ubiquitious, which enables us to deliver locally, having a ubiquitious reach and ensuring a really good experience. There is a direct correlation between long page load time and abandonment rate. Akamai delivers content fast so that the page load time is shorter leading to more engagement time, which directly affects the company ROI.

Companies now know that for them to be successful you need to have an acceleration platform like Akamai.

CIOL: An increasing number of consumers prefer to shop online through mobile devices. How do you optimize content for different form factors?

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BG: Initially, the user base was uniform - from desktop at home or office to site. Akamai's optimizations were at the origin and at the Akamai head server and the server near the user. Now, with the proliferation of devices, the optimizations in the last mile have become important. Its no more just the device, it's the app on the device, connectivity, location, etc., that factors into Akamai's optimizations.

Our product, the Aqua ION, is all about optimizations in the last mile where we intelligently optimize the page delivered to the device reducing the number of rides, catering to what can be rendered on the device, and able to apply image compression etc.

CIOL: How is the market reaction to Akamai's Aqua solution. What's the road map?

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BG: Currenty, Aqua is optimizing the last mile. With the smartphone explosion, we have started optimizing it over WiFi and 3G. The key here is that we enable these optimizations intelligently. The very many different devices mean Akamai's optimizations need to change as per the platform and delivery.

The client doesn't have to worry about any complexity of devices. Akamai ensures that new devices are made compatible with the site. They can focus on the market and new offers, and outsource the complexities of delivery and security to Akamai.

CIOL: What about the Akamai's visibility on potential threats. How is Akamai helping customers in this regard as security is not you domain

 

BG: Akamai has the most visibility when it comes to these attacks. When it comes to attacks, they recognized they are a big target and foresaw the challenge coming to Akamai proactively knowing of the solutions offered.

Cloud security is what they choose and when they eventually got attacked, it showed how the attacks came in all forms - a standard Denial of Services, DDoS attacks, application level attacks, different attack vectors. Attackers are smart and now they know that the company has a robust system and will not attack them in the future. Akamai acts as a deterrent to these hackers. What Akamai enables is this unique proposition - we will never compromise on our user experience and prevent attacks at multiple levels.

There is no one size fits all solution with regards to security. Defense in depth is paramount when it comes to security. Akamai helps to apply a right distributed security model that helps avoid future attacks and a lot of sophisticated attacks. Security is required at all levels and Akamai helps prevent them at current and future levels.

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