Akamai Ion Web Performance Solution Now Faster, Easier and more Intelligent

MIAMI, Oct. 8, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Akamai Edge Customer Conference – Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leading provider of cloud services for delivering, optimizing and securing online content and business applications, today announced several new capabilities within the company's flagship Web Performance Solution, Akamai Ion.  Introduced at the Company's annual customer conference, these enhancements are aimed at further improving web site and application performance; offering increased self‑serviceability of customers' Akamai environments; and providing greater intelligence and insight in the user experience. In addition, Akamai announced the Company has diversified its Ion product line in an effort to better meet the situational performance requirements for a wider variety of online businesses.

By combining real-time actionable insight, dynamic site optimization, and front-end optimization into a single, powerful solution, Ion can help deliver fast, quality web experiences independent of the user's browser, device, data source or network or connection type. As such, Ion is recognized as the industry's first and only situational performance solution. The new capabilities being introduced are targeted at customer requirements for enhanced performance, greater control and self-serviceability of their Ion deployments, and enhanced insight and intelligence into "Akamaized" web sites and applications. These new enhancements are categorized as such:

• Faster Performance: Web users demand the fastest, most highly performant experience possible. To help address these requirements, Ion now features up to 75 percent faster DNS resolution via Zone apex mapping. More intelligent routing decisions for users of third-party distributed DNS solutions such as Google DNS or Open DNS are designed to provide further performance improvements, particularly in key emerging markets globally. In Q4, Akamai plans to support automated creation of advanced image formats such as JPEG2000 and WebP to help accelerate browser rendering, particularly for users on cellular networks. Additional image optimizations designed to improve delivery of all images on the page are also planned for Q4.  
• Greater Self-Serviceability: Ion now features greater self-service capabilities intended to make configuration and optimization easier than ever. Optimal Suggested Policy introduces a dynamic configuration engine that helps identify ideal optimization settings. In Q4, Akamai expects Ion customers seeking greater self-sufficiency will have the ability to bring new web properties onto the platform on their own and access new APIs designed – available via developer.akamai.com – to improve provisioning, the testing process, allow re-use of optimization sets, and set per-browser optimization policies, among other capabilities.
• Insight and Intelligence: Akamai has added new performance reporting capabilities designed to provide customers better insight into interruptions and delays originating in the data center. Planned enhancements to Ion Real User Monitoring (RUM) are expected to offer broad visibility for both Akamai sites and non-Akamai sites to illustrate the impact of optimizations on overall web performance.
• Fast and Easy Access to Akamai Innovation: Akamai is introducing the "Beta Channel" , an advanced Beta program that is designed to allow customers an opportunity to quickly adopt and evaluate the latest pre-release innovations in Ion functionality as soon as they are developed. By opting-in to this complimentary service, it is expected that customers will have immediate access to the latest Akamai innovations so they can continue to innovate with Akamai ahead of their competition.  Currently, the program includes features such new algorithmic predictive pre-fetching which can have a material positive impact on performance.

One organization using Akamai Ion to enhance their customer brand experience is computational photography pioneer, Lytro.

"Using light field technology, Lytro is transforming photography and we rely on our web presence to demonstrate how our pictures are a fundamentally richer way to tell deeper stories," commented Azmat Ali, Vice President of Marketing, Lytro. "Letting users interactively shift perspective, explore depth, and share immersive 3D pictures is crucial to how people explore Living Pictures, and that is precisely what makes Ion a key aspect of our web strategy."

Diversifying Ion to Meet Customer Needs
In addition to introducing a range of new capabilities, Akamai is also announcing two new Ion editions intended to meet a company's specific requirements and primary use cases for web site and application optimization. Both provide customers the opportunity to apply Akamai's pioneering optimization approach – Situational Performance – to their web sites and applications. Customers can now purchase Ion in one of two editions:

Ion Premier: A powerful and comprehensive solution designed to offer maximum scale, performance and intelligence with specific focus on optimizing the front-end.  Ion Premier is designed for organizations delivering highly complex web experiences where performance is measured in milliseconds, such as top online retailers.   

Ion Standard: Ion Standard is intended to provide industry-leading performance, offload, and availability with key insight and intelligence accessed via an easy to manage cloud-based service built on the Akamai Intelligent Platform. Ion Standard is designed to be ideal for customers who are looking to get up and running with out-of-the-box optimizations today, while maintaining the flexibility to easily customize their Ion deployments as business needs evolve.

"End user expectations related to the performance of their favorite web experiences continue to drive organizations to strive for an experience that come as close to instant as possible," explained Mike Afergan, senior vice president and general manager, Web Experience Business Unit, Akamai. "Our ongoing commitment to innovation drives the development of the enhancements and the new features and functionality we bring to market. We want to give our customers the technology they need to exceed their users' most demanding requirements, not only today, but also into the future."

About Akamai
Akamai^® is the leading provider of cloud services for delivering, optimizing and securing online content and business applications. At the core of the Company's solutions is the Akamai Intelligent Platform™ providing extensive reach, coupled with unmatched reliability, security, visibility and expertise. Akamai removes the complexities of connecting the increasingly mobile world, supporting 24/7 consumer demand, and enabling enterprises to securely leverage the cloud. To learn more about how Akamai is accelerating the pace of innovation in a hyperconnected world, please visit www.akamai.com or blogs.akamai.com, and follow @Akamai on Twitter.

Akamai Statement Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act
This release contains information about future expectations, plans and prospects of Akamai's management that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements about offering new Ion capabilities in the future. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors including, but not limited to, failure of Akamai services to operate as expected or to address intended market needs, a failure of Akamai's network infrastructure, and other factors that are discussed in Akamai's Annual Report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and other documents periodically filed with the SEC.

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SOURCE Akamai Technologies, Inc.