Dolce&Gabbana Relies on Akamai

MILAN, Italy, March 21, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leading cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere, announced today that Dolce&Gabbana, the world's leading Italian brand in the fashion and luxury industry, has chosen Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator, part of the Company's Aqua Web Solutions, to accelerate all versions of its web site (www.dolcegabbana.com) as well as "Swide" (www.swide.com), its digital editorial hub available in English. Akamai's solutions have enabled the fashion brand to reduce site response time globally, decrease bandwidth utilization and reduce site abandonment while increasing site traffic and protecting its global brand image.  In addition to Dynamic Site Accelerator, Dolce&Gabbana is using Akamai Media Delivery to offer live and on demand streaming of their catwalks with unprecedented quality on any platform, including mobile devices like iPhone, iPad, iTouch and Android.

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"Millions of visitors from anywhere in the world access Dolce&Gabbana's web site every month. Analyzing the statistics related to the number of people accessing the web site, we noted that in some areas we were registering high abandonment rates. This was happening especially in the US, Japan and China," explained the Group Director Digital Marketing & Communication at Dolce&Gabbana.  The web site, extremely rich in multimedia content, was in fact so slow loading pages that it was nearly unusable for Dolce&Gabbana's customers.

"We therefore decided to ask for Akamai's support," continued the Group Director Digital Marketing & Communication at Dolce&Gabbana.  "Akamai analyzed the different versions of our web site and helped us determine that the main issue was poor performance in many countries where our portal is available. Unfortunately these countries represent our key markets.  We then implemented Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator solution to help accelerate the delivery of rich, interactive content and applications on our sites, thus ensuring seamless delivery of our web site."

Since implementing the solution, Dolce&Gabbana's web site performance has improved nearly six times globally on average, while page loads were five-and-a-half times faster in North America, six times faster in Asia, seven times faster in Australia, and more than five times faster in Europe. Before implementing Dynamic Site Accelerator, the site load time was over 8.5 seconds on average, but on Akamai, the response time has decreased to less than 1.5 seconds. By decreasing page load time, Dolce&Gabbana also lowered site abandonment, which in turn helped it increase e-commerce conversion rates.

Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator has also allowed Dolce&Gabbana to reduce the load on its data center by offloading over 87 percent of hits and traffic to Akamai edge servers, enabling it to confidently run high traffic marketing campaigns without special provisioning. In addition, Dolce&Gabbana uses Akamai's Content Targeting solution to customize content based on data about the visiting user's geographic location, connection speed, device type and other attributes. As a result, Dolce&Gabbana can deliver targeted content in real time at the network edge for each visitor.

Dolce&Gabbana has also leveraged Akamai's services to support the streaming of live events, such as the fashion catwalks.  The fashion and luxury manufacturer was one of the first companies in Italy to offer live streaming of catwalks – both on the web and on mobile devices. In this way, the advanced technologies provided by Akamai have become a valuable platform for Dolce&Gabbana. Leveraging Akamai's Media Delivery solution, Dolce&Gabbana has broadcast catwalks both live and on demand, streaming with an unprecedented quality and across multiple platforms, including iPhone, iPad, iTouch and Android mobile devices. Now, almost any version of the Dolce&Gabbana web site can be accessed from anywhere in the world and is supported by the Akamai Intelligent Platform.

"We are fully satisfied with Akamai and the complete suite of solutions have become essential for us," concluded the Group Director Digital Marketing & Communication at Dolce&Gabbana. "The Dolce&Gabbana brand is famous all over the world and our customers expect the highest quality and luxury even when accessing our web site. Thanks to Akamai, we are now able to offer outstanding web performance, and to protect the famous reputation of our brand, even online."

"Once upon a time, the importance of 'brand' in the fashion industry stopped at the style and quality of the clothes designed and presented on the catwalks," stated Henri d'Oriola, VP Southern Europe, Akamai Technologies. "Those days are long gone and, for a fashion giant such as Dolce&Gabbana, its brand value extends through everything that it does and especially to the Internet experience provided to its millions of customers worldwide. We are delighted to be working with Dolce&Gabbana to enable it to offer its customers a cutting-edge online experience to match the power of its brand regardless of wherever its customers are in the world."

About Dolce&Gabbana

Founded in 1985, Dolce&Gabbana is one of the world leaders in the luxury industry. Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, the two founders, have always been the creative and stylistic source of Dolce&Gabbana and D&G, the two brands of the company, as well as the first directors of the company's growth strategies. The Group creates, produces and distributes high level clothes, leather goods, shoes and accessories. The production and the distribution of Dolce&Gabbana and D&G perfumes and glasses, and D&G watches and jewelry is instead handled by partners.

The Group globally counts 3828 employees and a directly operated distribution network made of 116 points of sales and 17 factory outlets (on January, 31st 2009).        

About Akamai

Akamai® is the leading cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere.  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. 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, the effects of any attempts to intentionally disrupt our services or network by hackers or others, failure of Akamai services to operate as expected, unexpected termination of Akamai's relationship with Dolce&Gabbana, 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.

Akamai Press contacts in Italy:
Theoria
Simona Brozzi/Cristina Arborio
+39 02 202215.1
[email protected]

Akamai Press contact in US:
Helen Yang
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858-404-1436

SOURCE Akamai Technologies, Inc.