Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Slow Internet? Akamai says its products could do the trick

By Edd K. Usman

US-based tech firm Akamai Technologies has introduced in the Philippines ? a country long vilified for its supposedly slow mobile Internet ? a new product that it claimed can dramatically speed up the load-up time of websites.

Akamai Technologies executives (from left) Matthew H. Sturgess, senior major account executive; John Ellis, chief strategist for cyber security in Asia Pacific and Japan; and Gerald Penaflor, Philippine country manager
Akamai Technologies executives (from left) Matthew H. Sturgess, senior major account executive; John Ellis, chief strategist for cyber security in Asia Pacific and Japan; and Gerald Penaflor, Philippine country manager

Akamai, which calls itself a content delivery network (CDN), said it developed the Image Manager (IM) to address the performance and complexity challenges posed by image-heavy websites in various devices.

Craig Adams, vice president for Akamai’s Web Performance Products, said pictures offer compelling web experiences but they also have a tendency to do the exact opposite if companies don’t have an effective image management strategy in place.

“Image Manager makes it possible for our customers to have the best of both worlds by enabling them automatically deliver the right image, to the right device at the right time — ultimately keeping users more engaged,” Adams emphasized.

Image Manager belongs to Akamai’s Web Performance Solutions product family designed to help customers meet the specific changes of always-connected audiences. It is based on the company’s Intelligent Platform which is distributed worldwide.

Gerald Penaflor, Philippine country manager of Akamai, said customers can also subscribe to Akamai’s CDN platform to boost the speed of their website.

“If a website is a transactional one and performance and speed speed are key, then they should subscribe on the Akamai platform,” said Penaflor.

The company described CDN as “a highly-distributed platform or server that responds directly to end-user requests for web content,” acting as “an intermediary between a content server, also known as the origin, and its end users or clients.”

With Akamai, he said, everything can be accelerated — the booking, payment, etc. The benefits are enormous because the speed is good, the executive said.

Customers may also avail themselves of Akamai’s security offering to make sure they are safe from DDoS (distributed denial of service), their sites don’t get defaced, and they don’t get hacked.

“Akamai can turn on our DDoS protection and our web application firewall to make sure that everything that happens on the internet are protected and the customers are protected,” he said.

Akamai also offers media delivery, which is a very specific for for broadcasting where content can be shown in any device around the world. “That can also be done on the Akamai platform,” said Penaflor.

He said these are all part of Akamai’s services portfolio. “We have a lot of customers already in the Philippines — from banks, call centers, airlines, hotels, and even e-commerce site,” he said.

Penaflor expressed confidence their service offerings would be appreciated in three major industries — banking (for online banking, remittances, mobile banking); e-commerce; and government.

The Akamai executive said customers who want his company’s solutions and services they can buy subscription from PLDT, which is their channel partner since 2015 in the Philippines.

Akamai already has a strong presence in the country with its 800 servers and still growing in 10 cities through more than eight telecommunications operators.

Across the world, the company has over 216,000 servers established in more than 120 countries and within over 1,500 networks.

Further, 85 percent of the world’s Internet users are within a single “network hop” of an Akamai CDN server.

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