Akamai and Riverbed unite their respective strengths in Internet optimisation and WAN optimisation to accelerate applications over hybrid cloud networks. The joint offering is expected to be available early in 2012.
Akamai Technologies, a leading provider of cloud optimisation services, and Riverbed Technology, an IT performance company, will be working together to design solutions to overcome the application performance bottlenecks facing enterprises that leverage public cloud services.
“Enterprises are increasingly deploying a mix of both in-house and cloud-based applications,” said Joe Skorupa, research vice president, data center transformation, at Gartner. “As this shift to hybrid networks occurs, ensuring application performance and end-user productivity is critical, creating a need to integrate access to corporate applications, as well as SaaS, in a single pervasive framework.”Today’s enterprises are increasingly adopting public cloud computing services to avoid costly infrastructure build out, and to bring efficiency to business models such as software as a service (SaaS).
As a result, business applications in the cloud, having once resided within the corporate network, are being accessed over an often unpredictable public Internet. New solutions are required to overcome the performance, availability, scalability and security issues introduced by this hybrid network environment.
Both companies will develop a joint application acceleration solution for hybrid cloud networks that leverages a combination of Internet optimisation and wide area network (WAN) optimisation. The planned solution would be designed to accelerate cloud-based applications.
“Accelerating software as a service across a hybrid cloud environment helps businesses increase application adoption. We believe that greater adoption means improved business results, operating and infrastructure savings, and user productivity,” said Eric Wolford, executive vice president of Marketing and Business Development, Riverbed.In creating a joint offering, Akamai and Riverbed intend to focus on technology integration designed to solve the new application performance challenges introduced by hybrid cloud networks. Akamai Internet optimisation software would be integrated within Riverbed Steelhead appliances with the goal of extending Internet optimisations into enterprise networks, thereby extending Akamai’s edge from close proximity to the data center to directly within the enterprise.
In addition, Riverbed WAN optimisation software would be integrated within Akamai edge servers with the goal of extending WAN optimisation into the public cloud, thereby extending Riverbed’s edge from the data center to close proximity to cloud data centers.