CASE STUDY

Leader Summaries Proves the Value of Robust

Website Performance across South America

At a Glance Key Results

Company | Leader Summaries S.L. ++ Reduced Internet latency delays and download
times by 80-85%
Founded | 2002
++ Grew global client base and halted

Headquarters | Madrid, Spain performance-related subscription cancellations

++ Enabled expansion of offerings for future

Industry | Media & Entertainment
revenue growth

CDN Services | Dynamic Web

Acceleration, SSL,
DDos Protection,
Cloud DNS

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Founded in 2002, Leader Summaries has experienced rapid growth by providing business summary
library books for professionals around the world through the company’s website www.leadersummaries.
com. Today, over 21,000 unique visitors per day visit the website to view and download a library of
volumes in the areas of Management Skills, Innovation, Business Leadership, General Management,
Marketing & Sales and Human Resources.

Leader Summaries leverages a subscription model for its revenue generation - a model which has
traditionally worked well, because customers can subscribe and fulfill their research goals easily at
leadersummaries.com. The website serves a customer base that spans six continents. However, with
the majority of their content published in Spanish, Leader Summaries earns the majority of subscriber
revenue from loyal readers in Spain and the countries of South America.

With the surge in popularity of leadersummaries.com across South America, many subscribers were
visiting the website from telecom networks that delivered unreliable performance. As subscriber volumes
grew, so too did the time it took to deliver content from the Leader Summaries datacenter in Spain to
demanding users in South America. At one point, with latency-induced delays driving page-load times up
to 20 seconds in areas of Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru, customers grew angry and complaint volumes
skyrocketed. “We knew we needed to address the problem immediately,” said Enrique Monreal, General
Director of Leader Summaries. “Poor website performance led to cancelled subscriptions, placing our
entire business model at risk.”

Monreal knew his IT team had to identify the fastest means possible of improving international website
performance.

The Challenge: Delivering High-Speed Content

across South America
Leader Summaries wanted to optimize website and download speeds between Spain and South America
as their primary goal. However, the cost of establishing a second data center in South America was high
and did little to guarantee performance improvements in all the countries of the region. To gain local
performance in as many geographies as possible, the team decided to use a CDN. This, they felt, would
boost performance everywhere while enabling the fastest deployment possible

When evaluating their various CDN options, Monreal’s team focused on several criteria:

ff Performance – ability to drastically improve page download and applications speeds across South
America

ff Data security – specifically, management of SSL infrastructure

ff Global Presence – Points of presence throughout the eastern and western hemispheres, as subscriber
growth was also occurring in Europe and Asia

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The Solution: CDNetworks Global CDN with
Robust Data Security
The IT team of Leader Summaries had read numerous reports of CDNetworks speeding websites on a
global scale, which led them to place CDNetworks on their short list of vendors. “We had seen how they
managed website performance in the most difficult world regions, including China,” explained Monreal.
“Sure enough, they provided performance tests that met our demands everywhere, including our number
one target region for improvement - South America.”

Beyond demonstrable performance benefits, Monreal was pleased with the unified CDNetworks
architecture which enables automated SSL security. ”SSL certificate verification can really slow
communications between our origin server and international users,” said Monreal. “But, CDNetworks
keeps SSL certificates in the network to make this necessary security functionality as fast as possible.”

The Results: Vast Performance Improvements

and Happy Subscribers
As CDNetworks had shown in testing, the actual implementation of leadersummaries.com onto the
CDNetworks global infrastructure improved website and content download times by 80-85 percent
across the countries of South America and all other world regions. Figure 1 below shows the “Before and
After” download speed test results for the South American countries served by leadersummaries.com.

“We were pleased to see that

CDNetworks had reduced our page-
load times from 10-20 seconds, down to
just 1 second,” said Monreal. “The higher
website performance immediately
helped us attract new customers and
improve our subscriber retention rate.”

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 As a second measure of speed verification, Smooth Stat (www.smoothstat.com) provided speed
measurements of the leadersummaries.com website shortly after CDNetworks began managing the
site’s global delivery. Results from the Smooth Stat site are shown here: http://leadersummaries.com.
smoothstat.com/ and state that the average load time to be 1.6 seconds. “That’s very fast when you
consider we’re frequently delivering 20-page business documents to our subscribers,” stated a very
satisfied Monreal.

About Leaders Summaries

Since 2002 Leader Summaries provides a library of hundreds of book abstracts for personal and
professional development, organized in a variety of themes and disciplines in many functional areas of
a business. The library is organized into six major areas, which include Management Skills, Innovation,
Leadership, Management, Marketing & Sales and Human Resources. Each abstract is a comprehensive
document that concisely expresses the ideas of the author of the book, supplemented by numerous
practical examples and case studies. Each can be read in approximately 20-30 minutes either on the
screen or downloaded as a PDF file. In addition, Library subscribers can download our applications for
iPad and Android devices

For more information, visit http://www.leadersummaries.com

About CDNetworks
CDNetworks is a global content delivery network (CDN) with fully integrated Cloud Security DDoS
protection and web application firewall. Our mission is to transform the Internet into a secure, reliable,
scalable, and high-performing Application Delivery Network. CDNetworks accelerates more than 40,000
websites and cloud services over a network of 200 global PoPs in established and emerging markets
including China and Russia. We have been serving enterprise customers for 15 years across industries
such as gaming, finance, ecommerce, high tech, manufacturing, and media. CDNetworks offices are
located in the U.S., UK, South Korea, China, Japan, and Singapore. For more information, please visit:
http://www.cdnetworks.com

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