You are on page 1of 12

White Paper

The Hyperconnected World: A New Era of Opportunity

Table of Contents

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HYPERCONNECTED ERA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 KEY TRENDS OF THE HYPERCONNECTED WORLD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Mobile Media Cloud Security 3 3 4 5

MASTERING THE HYPERCONNECTED WORLD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Mobile: Engage your customers anywhere, anytime, on any device Media: Wow your audiences and monetize your digital assets at scale Cloud: Move your applications to the cloud and gain efficiency, productivity, and agility Security: Protect your enterprises new perimeter without sacrificing performance 6 6 7 7

THRIVING IN THE HYPERCONNECTED WORLD: CASE STUDIES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Customer Case Study: Leading Car Rental Brand Customer Case Study: NFL 8 9

THE AKAMAI SOLUTION PORTFOLIO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

The Hyperconnected World: A New Era of Opportunity

Executive Summary
The hyperconnected world is todays reality. No longer are we in a world where consumers and employees go online to work, play, or purchase; we are now in a world where everyone and everything simply is online, whether at home, at school, at the ofce, or on-the-go. This new era brings with it an acceleration of innovation and disruption. Its a world lled with opportunity for those willing to embrace it and able to tame it. All around us, across every industry, companies are discovering new audiences, creating new revenue streams, building new ecosystems, and inventing new business models all online, all at an unprecedented pace. The Internet has evolved from being a nice-to-have an additional channel for growth to becoming the channel for growth and innovation.
Understanding current trends in four areas mobile, media, cloud, and security is critical to embracing the hyperconnected era. Each key trend offers signicant opportunities as well as obstacles to overcome. To take advantage of the underlying potential, companies need the ability to consistently deliver optimized, rich interactions to every user, across every device. Without the right cloud platform, this is difcult, as Internet congestion, slow cellular networks, chatty protocols, and device proliferation create user experience problems. In addition, businesses must contend with security, complexity, and time-to-market challenges in todays chaotic marketplace. Akamai powers the hyperconnected world with a platform that now handles more than a trillion interactions each day. Built on this intelligent platform, Akamais complete cloud solution portfolio is designed to help companies embrace current trends to accelerate their businesses. Akamai reduces the complexity and chaos of the connected world so that innovative companies can move with agility and speed, engaging and delighting their customers with the most secure, high-performing user experiences anytime, anywhere, on any device.

An Introduction to the Hyperconnected Era


What does it mean to be hyperconnected? Today, commercial wireless signals already cover more of the worlds population than the electrical grid1, and the number of connected devices around the globe is expected to hit anywhere from 50 billion to a staggering one trillion in the next ve years.2 The sheer enormity of digital information that now connects us is mind-blowing. Cisco estimates that by 2015, the amount of data crossing the Internet every 5 minutes will be equivalent to the total size of all movies ever made, and that annual Internet trafc will reach a zettabyte roughly 200 times the total size of all words ever spoken by humans.3 For businesses, the hyperconnected world brings hyper-accelerated innovation. The Web itself has evolved from simple, static brochure-ware sites to highly interactive, personalized, rich applications driven by real-time data and social feedback. Mobile applications extend the evolution even further. As we use a growing collection of devices to stay connected from laptop to tablet to phone to TV, we are changing the way we work, play, and communicate.

Akamai helps us realize our vision and pursue new avenues of revenue.
Troy Causey, Turner Sports

The Hyperconnected World: A New Era of Opportunity

We have new channels for sharing and socializing with friends; new ways to advertise and to shop; new paradigms for consuming; new business models for selling. Music is now purchased by monthly subscription or single-song download. E-book sales have overtaken print books. Television has broken out of the living room onto multiple screens, on demand. Retail is promoted via group buying and ash sales. Breaking news is broadcast on Twitter. And the hyperconnected world is also giving us countless new ways to make use of latent resources from renting out our spare bedrooms, parked cars and free time, to crowdsourced funding and design. From young startups to global stalwarts, businesses of all sizes across all industries are innovating, transforming and being transformed at an unprecedented rate. Examples are all around us: a leading car rental brand now generates more than 95% of its rental car bookings online and has leveraged the Internet to expand into completely new business lines. The NFL is using innovative, cross-platform HD video offerings to grow its fan base and capture new revenue opportunities as the media and entertainment industry undergoes rapid evolution. Design powerhouse Dolce & Gabbana is leading the way in bringing high fashion to global audiences by streaming its catwalk shows to mobile devices. And for upstart Airbnb, being born in the hyperconnected era made it possible to disrupt the $127 billion hospitality industry in just 3 short years.4

Essential. No other word better denes what Akamai means to Dolce & Gabbana.
Group Director, Digital Marketing & Communication division, Dolce & Gabbana

Innovator Snapshot: Airbnb Dubbed a community marketplace for unique spaces, Airbnb helps connect people who want to rent out space in their homes with travelers looking for a place to stay, tapping into a completely new source of inventory and revenue for the hospitality industry. Founded just 3 years ago, the company has already facilitated over 2 million nights of lodging in over 19,000 cities worldwide. As a cloud-based service, Airbnbs success depends heavily on its users web site experience; its site boasts gorgeous design, rich imagery, and many dynamic, interactive features. By leveraging the Akamai Platform, the company was able to make its site over 2.5 times faster and scale its business globally all without missing a beat. The Akamaization of its entire site took just 2 weeks from kickoff to going live, allowing Airbnb to continue executing at hyper-speed.

Innovator Snapshot: Dolce & Gabbana As one of the rst Italian fashion brands to offer rich multi-media content online, iconic fashion label Dolce & Gabbana continually pushes the envelope in bringing its global customers online and mobile experiences to a level of quality and luxury commensurate with its brand. Using Akamai, its global site performance is roughly 6 times faster, decreasing site abandonment and increasing conversions. Dolce & Gabbana further optimizes the user experience by leveraging Akamais real-time intelligence about geography, device type, and connection speed to deliver targeted media and content. With Akamais help, Dolce & Gabbana continues to execute on its forwardthinking strategy, recently becoming the rst company in Italy to make its catwalk shows available via high quality live and on-demand streaming on every platform, including the iPad, iPhone and Android mobile devices.

The Hyperconnected World: A New Era of Opportunity

Key Trends of the Hyperconnected World


The hyperconnected world presents tremendous opportunities for businesses to lead through innovation and evolution. To do so, companies need to understand the changing business dynamics driven by the new online paradigm. Four key trends shape todays marketplace: mobile, media, cloud, and security. Each one represents its own set of challenges and opportunities for businesses navigating these uncharted territories.

Mobile The massive growth of smart phones and other connected devices over the last few years has been a key force in driving the hyperconnected paradigm. Smart phone shipments have already surpassed traditional cell phones in the U.S. and Europe, and global mobile data trafc is expected to grow 26X in the next 5 years.5 This exploding adoption rate of mobile devices and applications is transforming the way people work, shop, and play. Mobile search, for example, has grown 4X in the last 4 years,6 while U.S. mobile commerce nearly doubled in 2011, with high levels of activity in categories such as ash sales, local commerce, and ticket sales.7 The opportunity in this burgeoning market is tremendous and still largely untapped. IDC predicts that in 2012, mobile devices will generate more revenue than desktops, as well as drive 43% of all IT growth on the enterprise side.8 Worldwide, mobile commerce and mobile marketing revenues are projected to reach $119 billion and $56 billion by 2015, respectively.9 In addition to being a direct source of revenue, mobile will play an important role as an integrated part of overall strategy to reach and engage customers. It represents a unique opportunity for companies to connect with a broader audience in a more targeted, more personal, more urgent way. At the same time, companies face serious challenges when deploying to the mobile channel. They must grapple with time-to-market pressures as well as the complexity of optimizing delivery for a myriad of devices, each with its own unique form factor and capabilities. Moreover, user expectations on mobile devices are just as high, if not higher, than in the traditional desktop world, as users demand immediacy, convenience, and simplicity from their mobile experience. Despite slower cellular networks and more limited device capabilities, most users expect mobile pages to load just as quickly as desktop Web pages and are unlikely to recommend or return to underperforming mobile sites.10 Thus, companies looking to leverage mobile successfully need to be able to deliver streamlined, high-performance experiences customized to each user and each device.

Media From smart phones and tablets to connected televisions, Blu-ray players, and gaming consoles, hyperconnected consumer devices are driving a rapid transformation of the media and entertainment industry, as audiences are watching and demanding increasing amounts of programming online. This translates into lucrative possibilities for new business models that leverage capabilities such as over-the-top video distribution, mobile video, embedded video advertising, and new commerce models. Online videos unique ability to engage and interact with audiences is particularly valuable. According to eMarketer, U.S. online video ad spend grew a massive 52% in 2011 and is expected to continue to grow by 43% in 2012 and more than triple by 2015, making it by far the fastest growing segment of online spending.11 Similarly, InStat predicts that the market for TV and lm delivered over IP monetized through a variety of models including advertising, subscriptions, online rental, and electronic sell-through will double by 2015.12 Video is playing an increasingly important role in the online retail sector as well, as companies use videos to foster trust, boost engagement and encourage action on their Web sites.

The Hyperconnected World: A New Era of Opportunity

At the same time, delivering a compelling online video viewing experience can be challenging for a number of reasons.
 Complexity. Media consumption is quickly moving to a multi-screen, multi-device experience, leaving

publishers to deal with a complicated mess of ever-changing devices, players and applications, along with numerous formats, codecs, containers, protocols, and security mechanisms.
 User experience. Audiences expect a true HDTV-like experience, but delivering video over an unreliable

medium such as the Internet can cause numerous problems, including long buffering delays and playback interruptions, causing viewer abandonment and damaging brand image.
 Content protection. Many online video business models rely on the ability to protect digital assets from

piracy and unauthorized viewing. Companies need a way to secure their content and enforce entitlements without creating challenges for their legitimate users. Initiatives like TV Everywhere and Ultraviolet underscore the importance of a unied experience where paying consumers can access their subscription or purchased content seamlessly across multiple devices.
 Fragmented audiences. As audiences move online, there is concern over increased fragmentation and

the difculty in measuring and monetizing those audiences via traditional mechanisms like Nielsen ratings. In reality, however, with the right business intelligence tools, online video represents a greeneld opportunity to understand audiences at a much more granular level, with the ability to create far more valuable targeted advertising experiences at scale.

Cloud Cloud computing addresses a key need for companies operating in the hyperconnected world by providing the efcient infrastructure necessary to support an agile business, a hyperconnected workforce, and a global customer base. By providing on-demand access to applications and resources anytime, anywhere, cloud computing offers businesses signicant cost savings and operational scalability. Comprising solutions that include Infrastructure-asa-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service, and Cloud Optimization services, cloud computing is not just a set of technological advances, but also a business and operational paradigm shift to the concept of sharing infrastructure and application resources in exchange for economies of scale, accelerated time to market, and greater ability to meet the needs of a fast changing marketplace. The market is expected to grow at anywhere from 20% to 30% per year over the next several years, with Gartner predicting a $149 billion market by 2014.13 Yet despite tremendous potential benets, cloud computing has several obstacles to adoption. Most enterprises will evolve towards a hybrid cloud model that combines public and private networks as well as multiple third-party services. This heterogeneous environment can be difcult to manage and secure. Companies need to retain visibility and control over their data and applications, and they need condence that cloud solutions will deliver to their increasingly global and mobile workforce and customer base with consistently high levels of performance and security, especially as the security of data and applications becomes an ever more critical requirement. Unfortunately, many cloud infrastructures are located in one or two large, centralized data centers, and therefore are not architected to provide the levels of availability and responsiveness enterprises need. To exacerbate matters, most cloud applications are highly dynamic, chatty applications that do not lend themselves well to acceleration over traditional content delivery networks. Until these issues can be addressed, companies will be slower to leverage the benets that cloud computing promises.

The Hyperconnected World: A New Era of Opportunity

Security As the Internet has become essential to business and commerce in the hyperconnected era, online security has evolved into a core, business critical issue. Todays cyber criminals are no longer just hackers wanting bragging rights. More and more, they are driven by economic or political motives, and may be linked to governments or organized crime. Online attacks have grown tremendously in size, frequency, and sophistication, and no company, large or small, can afford to ignore the risks. In fact, industry experts have estimated that cybercrime now costs businesses anywhere from hundreds of billions to over $1 trillion a year.14 One of the most common attacks is a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, where attackers attempt to bring down an Internet site or service by inundating it with illegitimate requests, often through the use of botnets, or large armies of infected machines. In 2011, hacker collective Anonymous orchestrated several highly publicized DDoS attacks, including those against major nancial institutions for stopping payment to the Wikileaks site and against Sony for suing a hacker who jailbroke the PlayStation 3. In the latter case, the DDoS attacks provided cover for an even more insidious attack resulting in the theft of millions of PlayStation Network users personal information. DDoS attacks have become rather common, in large part because they are relatively cheap and easy to launch. Underground sites even advertise DDoS attacks-for-hire for as little as $40 to $50 per day.15 In a Forrester Research study, 74% of responding companies had experienced a DDoS attack within the past year.16 Akamai has seen DDoS attack trafc double across its network between 2010 and 2011, with average attack sizes ranging from 3 to 10 Gbps. In addition, the sophistication of the attacks has continued to grow. Unfortunately, these cheap-to-launch attacks can be expensive for the victim, with VeriSign nding that companies spend an average of $2.5 million to defend against DDoS attacks, while damages from lost sales, lost productivity, and harm to brand reputation could be far higher.17 In addition to the more obvious loss from downtime, such attacks can tie up an enterprises technical teams for weeks after the attack, effectively paralyzing the companys critical online operations. In the case of its 2011 security breach, Sony estimated a cost of more than $170 million in damages, not including liability from potential user lawsuits due to their information being stolen.18 Several analysts have estimated that the total cost could be in the billions.19 Other types of cyber attacks target Web site vulnerabilities. As more mission-critical assets and transactions move to the cloud, Web applications are becoming the new enterprise perimeter. And with todays fast-changing technologies, complex architectures, and highly interactive applications, that perimeter is growing increasingly vulnerable to outside attack, putting intellectual property, sensitive customer data, and brand reputation all at risk. Moreover, companies often have regulatory requirements to uphold, such as the compliance with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards), and FISMA (Financial Information Security Management Act). Fortifying the enterprises online perimeter to address these challenges and requirements can be complex, but it is absolutely mission-critical, and companies are looking for ways to simplify the necessary processes and activities.

Akamai keeps innovating, so we use those innovations to solve our problems.


Jaikishen Baliga, Times Internet

The Hyperconnected World: A New Era of Opportunity

Mastering the Hyperconnected World


What these four trends have in common is that they all point to a landscape full of innovation and opportunity. For companies able to understand and master mobile, media, cloud and security, there is great potential to be able to reach a far wider audience, foster a more loyal customer base, discover new revenue streams, and even disrupt an entire industry. At the same time, the landscape is one that is becoming increasingly complicated as it evolves with unprecedented speed. In order to capture the latent opportunities, businesses need to be agile unhampered by infrastructure, unimpeded by complexity. They need an online platform that accelerates their cloud and mobile Web strategies, enabling them to engage the hyperconnected world as quickly and efciently as possible. For over a decade, Akamai has helped enable the worlds leading companies successfully leverage the connected world to grow their brands and businesses. Handling more than 1 trillion interactions daily, the Akamai Intelligent Platform is the leading cloud-based platform for delivering secure, engaging user experiences to any device, anytime, anywhere. Akamai handles the underlying complexities of the hyperconnected world, from device and format proliferation, to application and network security, to performance and reliability issues, so that customers dont have to. They can simply focus on executing, innovating, and winning. With help from the Akamai Intelligent Platform, Akamais customers are able to embrace the trends of the hyperconnected world and turn them into competitive advantages. Heres how:

Mobile: Engage your customers anywhere, anytime, on any device Akamai can help its customers exploit the power of the mobile revolution by getting rid of the complexity enabling mobile sites to launch faster and better, with optimized experiences for every user and every device, every time. Currently, Akamai helps more than 3,000 mobile properties expand their reach and boost engagement and delivers over one million mobile applications each day. Whether a company is new to mobile or already has a sophisticated presence, Akamai can reduce time to market while delivering the fast, rich interactions mobile users demand. The device intelligence built into the Akamai network allows sites to automatically take advantage of the specic capabilities of different devices in order to deliver the best possible experience. In addition, using protocol, application, and front-end mobile optimizations, Akamai accelerates the on-the-go experience, whether over Wi-Fi or more limited cellular networks. Akamais mobile solutions are designed to help businesses move their mobile strategies faster forward, promoting greater user adoption and, in turn, greater revenue opportunities.

Media: Wow your audiences and monetize your digital assets at scale All of the worlds top 30 media and entertainment companies20 count on Akamai to help them delight and grow their audiences. Akamai makes it simple to deliver brilliant, interactive, HD-quality media, securely and at scale, across multiple devices and formats. This helps customers monetize and protect their valuable digital assets while offering the seamless, feature-rich experience audiences demand. Moreover, Akamais built-in support of emerging business models, such as those enabled by TV Everywhere and Ultraviolet, makes it easy for our customers to stay ahead of the curve in this fast-paced environment. In addition to helping enterprises secure their content, simplify their workow, and get to scale quickly, the Akamai Intelligent Platform opens a new world of possibility for publishers through the unique insight it offers into audience behavior, content popularity, and quality of service unied across different devices. By providing rich, real-time, cross-platform audience intelligence at a more granular level than ever before possible, Akamai makes it possible for our customers to create tremendous value through highly personalized and innovative advertising and viewing experiences.

The Hyperconnected World: A New Era of Opportunity

Cloud: Move your applications to the cloud and gain efciency, productivity, and agility Having enabled enterprise cloud strategies since its inception, Akamai helps companies take advantage of the benets of cloud computing more quickly and more fully by offering robust performance, reliability, visibility, and security for applications running across public, private, and hybrid clouds. With solutions for both cloud service providers and enterprises wanting to use cloud services, Akamai is pushing cloud computing faster forward and empowering customers to realize gains in operational efciency, workforce productivity, and business agility without sacricing security or control. Today, the Akamai Intelligent Platform secures and accelerates over 1,000 highly dynamic cloud applications. With its unique ability to optimize global routes, streamline chatty protocols, and deploy applications at the Internets edge, the Akamai platform offers unmatched performance, scalability, and reliability for these applications. And with its cutting-edge security capabilities, sophisticated network and application management tools, and the proven ability to defend against attacks at scale, the Akamai Intelligent Platform is designed to transform the chaos of the cloud into a protected and dependable environment for mission-critical transactions.

Security: Protect your enterprises new perimeter without sacricing performance Using its unique window into the real-time state of Internet conditions and user behaviors, the Akamai Intelligent Platform offers a robust and sophisticated layer of cloud security that defends without sacricing performance. Time and time again, it has protected customers against everything from large-scale DDoS attacks to cutting-edge Web application hacks.
 In July 2009, Akamai absorbed illegitimate trafc peaking at over 120 Gbps from more than 300,000 different

IP addresses, as the U.S. government faced the largest DDoS attack in its history. As a result, all of Akamais customers withstood the attack without disruption, while non-Akamaized sites that were attacked suffered service interruptions, with many completely shut down for as long as two days.
 During the week after Thanksgiving 2010, several Akamai customers saw thousands of times their normal request

volume in highly distributed DDoS attacks as part of a cyber-extortion attempt. By maintaining site availability, Akamai helped these customers avert $17M in lost revenue.21
 In late 2011, Anonymous targeted an Akamai customer with a sophisticated but ultimately unsuccessful

cyber attack. Akamai provided a robust multi-layered defense that automatically shielded against many types of illegitimate trafc, including SQL injection and other application layer attacks, Low Orbit Ion Cannon attacks, as well as trafc from IP addresses that were making requests at too high a rate.
 In January 2012, in response to the shutdown of lesharing site MegaUpload, DDoS attacks attributed to

Anonymous targeted a number of Web sites belonging to government, media, and intellectual property enforcement organizations in the United States and Western Europe. Targeted sites that were delivered and protected by Akamai continued to operate normally during these attacks. Anonymous achieved several well-publicized successes at disabling targeted Web sites that were not on the Akamai platform during the attacks. Akamais security solutions provide defense-in-depth for an enterprises entire online infrastructure, from the origin site and DNS service, across the global Internet cloud, all the way to the end user. Akamai also helps companies address their liability and regulatory requirements, through compliance management services and a unique edge tokenization offering that remove sensitive credit card information from origin infrastructure. Together, these solutions help protect companies mission-critical infrastructure while enabling them to enjoy the productivity and cost benets of the cloud.

The Hyperconnected World: A New Era of Opportunity

Thriving in the Hyperconnected World: Case Studies


At Akamai, our customers are leading innovators of the hyperconnected world. Whether they are centuries-old corporations or hyper-growth startups, these companies rely on Akamai to simply make the Web and mobile world a secure, reliable, highly productive place to do business as they dene and execute their core strategies around the revolutionary trends of the hyperconnected era. Akamai is not just a content delivery network, a media delivery network, or a mobile delivery network think of Akamai accelerating businesses, not just Web sites. Our solutions are designed to help companies attain global reach as their businesses expand, simplify workow, manage complexity, protect their applications, monetize their assets, and understand their audiences. And Akamai is continually innovating to help our customers continually innovate as the connected world evolves. The following case studies take a closer look at two leading enterprises that thrive in the hyperconnected world through their cutting-edge approaches to online and mobile applications. Partnering with Akamai over the past few years, they have successfully leveraged the pervasive reach of the Internet cloud to launch new revenue streams, improve customer service, and delight eager audiences.

Customer Case Study: Leading Car Rental Brand Over the last several years, this leading car rental brand has seen double-digit growth in its online site, to the point where 95% of reservations now take place online, representing billions of dollars of revenue. Their online presence now spans 138 domains in 19 languages and has played a critical role in expanding the companys business operations to include new prot channels such as an hourly car sharing service and an innovative rent-to-buy program. As a brand known for service and quality, the company felt it was paramount to provide the best possible service and experience to its customers on any device, anywhere in the world. It originally came to Akamai three years ago in search of better site performance. Akamai delivered with site response times dropping from 9 seconds to 1.3 seconds in the U.S. and from 55 seconds down to a mere 2.5 seconds in China. But the company soon realized that Akamai could deliver far more than just performance. On the operational side, Akamai makes it easier for the company to manage and maintain robust availability for its large number of online properties many of which were built on different legacy systems, resulting in a messy and complicated environment. It also leverages the Akamai Intelligent Platform to optimize its sites appearance and content across different types of mobile devices and to deliver geo-intelligent content, such as location-specic promotions. Additionally, with Akamais Edge Tokenization service, this leading car rental brand has saved more than two million dollars on PCI Compliance while reducing risk and liability, and in 2012, will be implementing additional Akamai security and trafc management services to further fortify its mission-critical online presence. Enabled by Akamai, this leading car rental brand continues to successfully push the envelope, leveraging cloud computing and connected applications to improve operational efciency while providing better customer service. Recently, it launched express rental kiosks, making it possible for customers to complete car rental transactions via face-to-face video with a remote agent, reducing customer wait times while maintaining more exible stafng capabilities. The ability to execute on innovations like these will be a factor in keeping the company at the forefront of its industry as it navigates the hyperconnected era and beyond.

The Hyperconnected World: A New Era of Opportunity

Customer Case Study: NFL Exceeding the expectations of its passionate fan base is of utmost importance at NFL.com. The site engages fans year-round with rich media entertainment including exclusive video highlights and live event broadcasts. Back in 2006, the NFL made a strategic decision to make video a key differentiator for its site. The NFLs goal was to give its fans as much video as possible hundreds of clips per game, sliced by team, by player, by moment. Immediately after implementing its plan, site consumption and engagement went way up, and fans asked for more. Since then, in partnership with Akamai, the NFL has continued to raise the bar for cutting-edge sports entertainment delivering more video, on more platforms and more devices, more quickly than ever before. With each new innovation, NFL.com has seen big increases in both audience growth and consumption from existing viewers. By using the Akamai HD Network to deliver its video streams both live and on-demand, the NFL is able to give each user the best possible quality stream, determined in real-time based on changing device and network capabilities. In addition, streams are encoded, stored, and published far more quickly than with a traditional video publishing workow. With Akamai, NFL.com is now able to produce in-game highlight clips, making them available within seconds of the live play. The NFL also leverages Akamais sophisticated platform intelligence to customize each experience to the user and device whether it be phone, tablet, laptop, or HDTV as well as to ensure content is only accessed in allowed geographies. In addition to video, the NFL relies on Akamai to accelerate all of its online and mobile properties, including fantasy football as well as its teams sites. This allows the NFL to focus on creating compelling content without worrying about performance, reliability, or scalability. Despite the extremely volatile and unpredictable levels of demand on its sites, the NFL knows with condence that its fans will not be disappointed. By exceeding fan expectations, the NFL has continued to draw larger crowds: during its January 2012 wild card weekend, it saw a 20% year-over-year increase in visitors across its sites as a whole, with a 76% increase across its mobile properties. Going forward, the NFL intends to extend its cutting-edge approach, bringing more innovative video content to more platforms, and integrating them with more interactive and social experiences. The intelligence that Akamai provides through its unique site and media analytics tools have been critical inputs to these forward-looking strategies, just as the Akamai platform is expected to be critical to their execution.

The Akamai Solution Portfolio: Your Key to Taming the Hyperconnected World
With the unparalleled pace of growth and change in the hyperconnected era, businesses looking to capitalize on the opportunities ahead need a cloud platform that is up to the task. Akamai offers a comprehensive solution portfolio for companies looking to accelerate their businesses. Akamais solutions are designed to help enterprises connect with their customers and mitigate security risks while embracing todays fast-evolving cloud, media, and mobile trends. Our solution portfolio includes:
 Web Site Optimization Solutions that are designed to intelligently deliver fast, personalized, secure Web sites to any

device, anywhere, anytime


 Video & Software Solutions that are designed to help customers to easily and cost-effectively engage audiences with

interactive HD-quality video, solve multi-device consumption challenges, and reinvent the software distribution channel
 Application and Cloud Performance Solutions that empower businesses with a next-generation network that provides

performance, security and control for enterprise cloud applications


 Security Solutions that deliver exible, intelligent cloud-based defense capabilities to help organizations guard their

perimeter and bolster security without sacricing performance


 Network Operator Solutions that can help operators to run a cost efcient network and eliminate the complexity

of interconnecting across providers.

Leading brands come to Akamai because they are looking for a complete solution to accelerate, secure, mobilize, and understand their online presence. The hyperconnected world will not wait, and you cannot afford to either.

Endnotes
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

http://www.kpcb.com/insights/internet-trends-2011 http://blogs.exerasoftware.com/ecm/2011/07/anyone-for-1-quadrillion-intelligent-connect-devices-on-the-internet.html http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/VNI_Hyperconnectivity_WP.html http://www.hotelnewsnow.com/articles.aspx/6895/AHLA-DHS-If-you-see-something-say-something, http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/entrepreneurship/2011/10/19/mary-meeker-of-kleiner-perkins-points-to-mobile-global-as-key-internet-trends/#ixzz1hE5PcZtK http://digital-stats.blogspot.com/2011/10/mary-meekers-internet-trends-october.html http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008769 IDC Predictions 2012: Competing for 2020. IDC. Dec 2011. http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=231720  BI Research: http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/5435-mobile-commerce-to-grow-to-119bn-by-2015-report, Mobitrove: http://www.dmcondential.com/blogs/column/MarketA ing/3055/ What Users Want from Mobile. Equation Research. July 2011. http://www.slideshare.net/RFONNIER/what-users-want-from-mobile-equation-research-july-2011 http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1008709&R=1008709 http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/12/prweb9010788.htm https://www.deloitte.com/assets/Dcom-Global/Local%20Assets/Documents/TMT/cloud_-_market_overview_and_perspective.pdf, http://softwarestrategiesblog.com/2011/01/01/  roundup-of-cloud-computing-forecasts-and-market-estimates-2011/, http://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/225700984/cloud-computing-services-market-to-near-150-billion-in-2014.htm;jsessionid=nz3eElS4Z0YUFJdd+zrKcg**.ecappj02, http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/cloud-computing-market-241-billion-in-2020/47702 http://blogs.mcafee.com/uncategorized/unsecured-economies-%E2%80%93-a-trillion-dollar-headwind http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/08/digital-hit-men-for-hire/ http://www.verisigninc.com/assets/whitepaper-ddos-threats-protection-forrester.pdf http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3933046/How+Much+Does+a+DDoS+Attack+Cost.htm http://www.periscopepost.com/2011/05/sony%E2%80%99s-hacking-costs/ http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/27/the-cost-of-sonys-playstation-network-outage-24-billion-or-20-million/ As dened by ZenithOptimedias Top Thirty Global Media Owners list $17M estimated revenue loss assumes November sales account for 12% of annual revenue, and that November 2010 online sales were up 13% over the prior year for these  companies

10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

The Akamai Difference


Akamaiis the leading cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere. At the core of the companys 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,andenabling enterprises to securely leverage the cloud.To learn more about how Akamai is accelerating the pace of innovation in ahyperconnectedworld, please visitwww.akamai.com and follow @Akamai on Twitter.

Akamai Technologies, Inc.


U.S. Headquarters 8 Cambridge Center Cambridge, MA 02142 Tel 617.444.3000 Fax 617.444.3001 U.S. toll-free 877.4AKAMAI (877.425.2624) www.akamai.com International Ofces Unterfoehring, Germany Paris, France Milan, Italy London, England Madrid, Spain Stockholm, Sweden Bangalore, India Sydney, Australia Beijing, China Tokyo, Japan Seoul, Korea Singapore
2012 Akamai Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission is prohibited. Akamai and the Akamai wave logo are registered trademarks. Other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners. Akamai believes that the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date; such information is subject to change without notice.

You might also like