Akamai, Riverbed Speed SaaS

BOSTON and SAN FRANCISCO -- Akamai® Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM) and Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD) today introduced the Steelhead® Cloud Accelerator, a jointly developed solution that combines Akamai’s innovative Internet optimization technology and market-leading Riverbed® wide area network (WAN) optimization technology to deliver end-to-end optimization for software-as-a-service(SaaS) applications. By combining the capabilities of the Akamai Intelligent Platform™ with the award-winning Riverbed WAN optimization technology, the companies will provide the industry’s first solution to overcome the performance issues introduced by hybrid cloud networks, especially for organizations that need to reduce traffic on backhaul links, and obviate the need for bandwidth upgrades.

The Steelhead Cloud Accelerator is a subscription-based add-on to existing Steelhead appliance deployments and does not require any changes in the way the appliances are deployed nor any changes to the SaaS provider’s infrastructure, regardless of where the application or end users are located, across any combination of physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. Enterprises need only to deploy a single instance of the Steelhead Cloud Accelerator for each SaaS application to take advantage of the optimization from the jointly developed solution from Akamai and Riverbed. Steelhead Cloud Accelerator will provide optimizations for SaaS applications Google Apps, Salesforce.com® and Microsoft® Office 365[1].

Akamai and Riverbed offerings are already used separately today by more than 17,000 organizations, including many Fortune 500 businesses worldwide. Riverbed WAN optimization solutions are used by globally-connected enterprises to speed data transfers and accelerate the performance for the broadest range of applications businesses care about most. Akamai’s globally-distributed network of more than 100,000 servers deployed in the cloud provides route, protocol and application layer optimizations for the Internet, and serves anywhere from 15-30 percent of all Web traffic at a given time.

The popularity of cloud-based services is growing within organizations of all sizes. According to Forrester Research[2], the SaaS market itself is expected to be more than $100 billion by 2017. “While attractive in many ways, the cloud introduces challenges around performance,” said Eric Wolford, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Products at Riverbed. “To overcome application performance bottlenecks encountered in unpredictable cloud environments, the Steelhead Cloud Accelerator gives organizations global SaaS performance that feels local.”

Akamai Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM)

Riverbed Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: RVBD)