Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing
CLOUD COMPUTING & outsourced services Akamai – First Cloud on the Horizon think about, in the commerce space, there are billions of dollars of transactions being done, and if you look around the world at the top online retailers, probably 80% or 90% of them are using Akamai. “Availability is another one where customers have a lot of traffic, or they have spikes in their applications, maybe it’s a news story, something happens on a particular day, so the idea that that website is going to be available and doesn’t get overwhelmed is another of the advantages that we sell.”
By Phil Sandberg
SEEKING TO
overcome the congestion and bottlenecks of the public Internet, Akamai was launched in 1999 to build on work undertaken by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) into algorithms for intelligently routing and replicating content over a large network of distributed servers. Today the company has over 2000 employees, annual revenues of US$859.8 million, and what it describes as “the most pervasive, highly-distributed cloud optimisation platform” with over 73,000 servers in 70 countries within nearly 1000 networks. The company’s offerings include: Digital Asset Solutions; the Akamai HD Video Network; the Akamai Media Delivery service; Electronic Software Delivery; Dynamic Site Accelerator; Web Application Accelerator; an IP Application Accelerator that provides optimised architecture for delivering all classes of IP-based applications; and Advertising Decision Solutions to enable more relevant online advertising. According to Greg Lazar, Akamai’s VP & GM for International and Global Partners, and Ian Teague, ANZ Country Manager, the company has truly reached a global level. “We’re getting larger,” says Lazar. “We have many more products than we used to have. We have many more business partners, resellers. We now have about five primary industries that we go to.”
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Greg Lazar [left], Akamai’s VP & GM for International and Global Partners, and Ian Teague, ANZ Country Manager.
play retailers already online and successful and profitable. So, that’s a big category for us. “Looking forward, we have customers in each of the other sectors, so we’ve got banks... good users. We have government departments, we actually have some small hi-tech. We also have the enterprise. So, corporate Australia is now using the Internet as a way of communicating, no longer buying fixed MPLS lines, which are expensive and slow to provision. They’re now using the public Internet with the Akamai services to give quality of service on top to deliver their apps.”
C+T: What is the make-up of your customers in Australasia?
C+T: So, it’s not necessarily limited to video? It can be anything?
GL: “The primary industries are what we call digital media, so that’s media and entertainment, social networking companies, broadcasters, sporting events, online games and publishing companies. “Digital media is our biggest industry, but close to that is e-commerce. E-commerce is basically online retailers, anybody pretty much selling anything online, but [it] also includes the travel and hotel industries. Then after that it breaks down into hi-tech companies, and then manufacturing companies, public sector, and financial services.”
IT: “Well, commerce actually uses a lot of video as well. It was siloed, but now people are seeing the benefits. In commerce they’re using rich, engaging video experience to help consumers purchase products. But, the big guy on the block and streaming is definitely media.”
IT: “In Australia, we’ve been very successful with most of the major media companies using us. We’ve been a bit slower in Australia in adopting e-commerce, 2010 was a landmark year in shift. All the major retailers are now going online. There are many pure
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C+T: For your customers, how big a factor is speed and how important is security? GL: “If you look on the enterprise side of the business, speed is always important. Since the day we started, the whole idea was ‘can we make this thing go faster?’ That’s always a number one design point of whatever we do. I would say a close second, in some cases it’s a first, is security. So, we’ve spent a lot of effort on secure applications, especially if you
IT: “We help our customers focus on their infrastructure layer and the look and feel of their site, whether it’s their streams or their site itself. But they don’t need to worry about how big do they build their infrastructures there. Because media companies aren’t infrastructure companies, and commerce companies really don’t have skills in that and neither does the enterprise, so we’ve got this great platform that they share, which really is a shared service. In fact, we truly are a cloud services platform.” C+T: Would you say you were the first cloud on the horizon? GL: “We’ve only been cloud. We probably should have used the term a lot earlier. We’ve caught up though. We’ve made sure the marketing department has pushed ‘cloud’, and it’s amazing. It’s really helped the stock price. “But, all kidding aside, we are cloud computing, I mean that’s what we do. If you look at our evolution, at the beginning it was not cloud computing ‘cause we’re just taking your stuff and we’re moving it. So, we’re really a delivery mechanism. But, we also very early on had a capability that we call edge computing. We’re not just taking your content and moving it, we’re running the application actually on the Akamai service. “The basic reason we’re in business is there’s what we call a middle-mile problem. That the Internet itself just bogs down. It just was not designed for high volume transactions and we solve that problem.” IT: “For our media customers, we continue to innovate. We’ve announced our universal streaming service where the goal is, we’re not there yet, but the goal is to have one stream in and to deliver multiple bit rates to multiple formats coming out. So, by the end of 2011, that’ll be reality. And so we have many services adding onto that.” C+T: Does that include digital rights management?
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IT: “Of course. Digital rights management is extremely important for content rights. Through services like tokenisation, we can protect a customer’s rights. So, many of the big names in the industry, ABC, BBC, Hulu in the US, all use Akamai’s technology to protect their content rights and deliver that out in a cost effective way as well.” C+T: What’s Akamai’s view on the various national broadband networks now being built around the world? GL: “Here’s the way, at a high level, we look at the opportunity. There’s the first mile problem, which is getting stuff out of the data centre, into the network, then the middle mile problem, which is being on the network itself, and then the last mile problem, getting it to the home. “Our whole focus has been the middle mile, but, obviously, if the bottleneck at the last mile is unsolvable, it doesn’t matter how fast we come, if you get here and it takes 45 seconds for somebody to render a page, it’s not going to work. So, the dynamic site acceleration capability actually helps to solve some of the last mile problems. “Quite simply, this is an opportunity for us. But it isn’t anything that we can control. We wouldn’t go to the Australian government and have them lay out their architectural plans and see how that might affect how we’re going to do things per se. “When the Australian government rolls this out, and however long that takes – five years, eight years, 10 years – whatever it is, my personal view is it won’t be enough. “When you look at other markets, let’s go to Korea, let’s go to Japan, markets like that, those kinds of societies are way ahead of the game in terms of their use of mobile devices. People have their iPhone here and their phone here and their Bluetooth there and everybody’s attached and talking and whatever. So, they have, I don’t say a multitude of bandwidth, but they have certainly more bandwidth than probably the average Australian citizen, and they’re using it. “Most traffic is still driven from a PC. So, whether it’s a desktop or a laptop, that’s how people access the net. But, more and more they are accessing it now through the iPhone and the iPad, whatever they have. “That is not a trend. That’s a rocket ship taking off. If you look at our investments, a lot is going into those mobile devices, and the mobile device support because it’s clear that you’ve got to be able to support that. People are going to new platforms and we need to support them and we need to work with our customers so that their websites will work, will be transformed if somebody’s looking at a Blackberry versus someone who’s looking at a laptop. So, we need to stay up with that trend. “The other thing that we’re seeing is the network itself. Akamai is embedded in the telecommunications network. We’re embedded on classic Intel UNIXbased systems, but embedded in these ISPs and these telcos. “One of the things we need to look at is what
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consumers are using to access it and what devices, but then if you look at the actual network, is it the old landline kind of telco environment, which really wasn’t built, especially when you start looking at video, as anything more than a voice system “The mobile networks are the same thing. I don’t think when people started doing cell phone towers 20 years ago they pictured people going to watch a movie on a phone. It almost seems ludicrous, but that’s what people are doing. “What’s happening here in Australia is very important, because you’ve got to get mobile, you’ve got to get more capacity out to the users. But, I think it’s just going to be you built a bridge and now you can go to the other side. I think you’ve got to build it and as you’re building that bridge there’s going to be other bridges being built at the same time and the devices and the support and the mobile networks, they’ll all evolve at the same time.”
GL: “The idea is you want the customer to not to have to give us three or four versions of their content. The more we can allow the customer to focus on their application and building their own content, then the better. “Not one of [the] customers are building everything themselves. They all talk about outsourcing. They’re basically saying ‘hey, I’ll let somebody else deal with this’. They’re too busy creating the content and trying to figure out [if] their customers are interested in [it] and how do we get them interested, using the site, how do we populate and keep the content fresh? That’s their business. Everything else is outsource, outsource!”
C+T: You mentioned taking one stream in and many streams out. How will that platform work?
IT: “Some publishers have taken the opportunity to go to different markets. Their market was under threat by the Internet, but a lot of them have just taken the opportunity and run with it. So, Lonely Planet’s a great example. They’ve got an online video channel. They’re now doing booking of holidays. They’re still selling a ton of books, and there’s blogs on the sites. They’ve really adopted all these different parts of the digital media world, combining it and transforming it and running with the business. And, they’ve been pretty successful. “Fairfax have just launched their video channel. They’re trying to cut the lunch of the TV stations. So, the game’s changed. If you have the audience, you have your eyeballs and you can get the content, you can create the right engaging experience. Certainly, I think the publishers are doing a great job in that.”
IT: “So you’ve got the multi-bit rate technologies that are available, which will take full advantage of the available capacity in the end-user network and they will fluctuate up and down as they go. So that’s part of the multi-bit rate technology. It’s also using HTTP (Adaptive Bitrate Streaming) as the transport. Everyone now is going to HTTP. Flash is also going to HTTP and we have our HD network, which is also usable for standard streaming delivery. “That enables us to deliver flash streams out across the HTTP platform, which is far greater and bigger. And so, the vision is to be able to have content owners have one stream come in one format and on our platform use our technology there to then deliver it out to the many different devices that are out there in the appropriate formats that are needed.”
C+T: Finally, are the traditional print-based companies, the newspapers and magazines, catching up with the broadcasters in terms of using the web?
Switch to Offer Hosted Flash Service Online broadcast platform provider, Switch Media has become one of the first companies in the world to offer Flash Access as a hosted service. Switch Media is the online technology partner to a range of broadcast, corporate and educational entities including AUSTAR, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), INSEAD, Disney, Fairfax Business Media and The Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia (CASBAA). Adobe Flash Access protects premium/broadcast video content for both streaming and downloading for viewing offline. The system gives content providers control over how their intellectual property is being used regardless of the delivery method. Switch Media will provide a cost effective option for what is normally an expensive and labour intensive investment in technology. The service will be made available to content providers no matter the size of the organisation. Technical Director of Switch Media, Luke Durham, says: “Online business models need a way to securely and effectively protect their copyright, no matter their size. The Flash Access solution offers a greater range of usage and delivery models that premium online video ventures require to be successful. This includes, subscription, rental and ‘download to own’ services. “Flash Access is a key part of our multi-platform multi-device online video solution, ensuring our services deliver the highest possible protection with the least impact on usability.” Visit www.switchmedia.asia
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