Akamai Announces New Services, Research and Partnerships

Akamai Technologies announced its vision for an integrated approach to delivering world class digital experiences at the ‘EDGE’ Conference – its annual customer event. With customers looking for the fastest online services backed by world-class data protection, EDGE covered how businesses can make this a reality.

At EDGE, Akamai announced a three-pronged approach to help businesses overcome these challenges, including innovative products, constructive partnerships and education efforts:

Industry Leading Service Innovations

• As the latest addition to the company’s Cloud Security product family, Akamai is launching Bot Manager Premier to help organisations manage the impact of bots across their entire digital environment. Bot Manager Premier can detect bot activity disguised as human interactions, even if the bots continually modify behaviour to evade detection, while targeting login and other transactional pages.
• Akamai also announced its strategy to support customers integrating Internet of Things (IoT) devices into their IT infrastructures. Through this initiative, Akamai will leverage the scale, performance and security of the Akamai Intelligent Platform to support fast, secure, and resilient distribution of data to connected devices anywhere across the globe, as well as to power advanced distributed communications and processing of data originating in these connected devices. The line begins with the availability of Over The Air (OTA) Updates, a solution specifically designed to meet the demands of automobile manufacturers’ connected vehicle initiatives.
• Major innovations to Akamai’s web and mobile solutions have also been revealed, focusing on improving web and mobile application user experiences, including:
  • Connecting digital performance to business objectives, with newly released ‘mPulse Lite’ – a free version of Akamai’s leading product in digital performance management which identifies opportunities to improve user engagement.
  • Analysing user data for performance optimisation, with enhancements to Ion  - Akamai’s flagship web and mobile performance acceleration suite – such as powerful cellular optimisation and an evolution of its Adaptive Learning Engine.
  • Further supporting customers’ DevOps strategies through significant extensions to its DevOps alignment initiative so that developers can realise the advantages of Akamai solutions without changing the way they work.

• Akamai also demonstrated how it can bring the predictability of broadcast TV to online video. The company showcased how its solution set has been designed to achieve a long-evasive goal: predictable delivery of high-quality online video to broadcast-scale audiences with highly sustainable economics when, traditionally, vendors have only been able to deliver two out of three of those characteristics. Akamai showed how services such as multi-source media distribution; dynamic ad insertion; streamlined integration with cloud services; broadcast-quality ingestion and low latency with liveOrigin™; and the ability to analyze data on telemetry from origin to viewer, was enabling it to optimize experience for its customers’ viewers.

Faster-Forward Partnerships

• Akamai content delivery network capabilities will now be available in the IBM Cloud. The forthcoming offering is designed to optimise the performance of customers’ content and applications deployed and delivered using IBM Cloud. Giving businesses the powerful tools needed to make the most of their cloud investments, IBM Cloud customers will be able to purchase Akamai CDN offerings as “self-select” options in IBM’s Cloud portal.

Delivering Valuable Insights

• As the world’s largest cloud delivery network provider, Akamai has unprecedented visibility into traffic flowing across both enterprise networks and the internet. In a new investigation into the behavior of a malicious botnet employing Fast Flux techniques. Akamai can reveal its continuing usage, and why the high level of sophistication being displayed requires a new approach to detection. The whitepaper is available for download here.

Boosting Product Portfolios Through Acquisitions

Nominum expected to bolster Akamai’s carrier and enterprise security product portfolios. Akamai Technologies has entered into an agreement to acquire Nominum, a market leader in DNS and enterprise security solutions for carriers.  The acquisition is intended to add complementary capabilities to Akamai’s portfolio of security offerings while expanding Akamai’s distribution to carriers that serve enterprise customers.  The all-cash transaction is expected to close later this quarter.