October 11, 1999 Web posted at: 10:29 a.m. EDT (1429 GMT) by Michael Vizard and Ephraim Schwartz

From...

NEW YORK (IDG) -- Akamai Technologies, an Internet-content delivery service, announced here at Internet World that it has added a streaming media capability to its service and expanded its network to 1,200 servers.

Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai provides a service that allows Web sites to significantly boost performance by linking their sites to a distributed Web infrastructure built and managed by Akamai.

MORE COMPUTING INTELLIGENCE
	IDG.net home page
InfoWorld home page
InfoWorld forums home page
InfoWorld Internet commerce section
Get Media Grok and The Industry Standard Intelligencer delivered for free
Reviews & in-depth info at IDG.net
IDG.net's personal news page
Year 2000 World
Akamai, Real Networks team on streaming video
Akamai frees up your Web site with distributed servers
Cisco, Apple tap Akamai for content-delivery technology
Questions about computers? Let IDG.net's editors help you
Subscribe to IDG.net's free daily newsletter for IT leaders
Search IDG.net in 12 languages
News Radio
	Fusion audio primers
	Computerworld Minute

"We're changing the way the Web works," said David Goodfree, Akamai vice president of marketing. "What we have built is a decentralized, real-time management model for content on the Web."

Because Akamai has alliances with over 40 ISPs, the company can monitor the condition of the Internet in real time. This allows the company to adjust load balancing in real time on its servers to compensate for network traffic congestion and serve content from the server that is geographically closest to the end-user.

Customers have been able to boost their site performance by opting to have the graphics-intensive portions of their site delivered from Akamai's Windows NT and Linux servers once a user has established a link with their site. This then reduces the need to trade off the richness of the site in terms of the graphics displayed and the overall performance of the site.

Officials at one sports programming Web site are currently considering using Akamai's service.

"We are looking at Akamai as well as all the providers. We are not a technology company and we try to partner with technology providers," said Pascal Wattiaux, senior vice president for technology at Quokka Sports, in San Francisco.

Wattiaux said Quokka still needs to build a number of tools that they cannot find in the market but that their general philosophy is to buy or partner.

"Akamai could help us give the consumer faster access to our content and therefore we can offer a better experience," Wattiaux said.

Wattiaux added that Quokka Sports is currently building the business case for going to Akamai or other providers offering a similar service.

"Everything we can do within a reasonable business case to facilitate the consumer experience we will do," Wattiaux said.

Akamai also announced a new alliance program under which software vendors will co-market Akamai's service along with their software. The first member of this alliance is Vignette Systems, a provider of a Web publishing systems in Austin, Texas.

Michael Vizard is InfoWorld's executive news editor.InfoWorld Editor at Large Ephraim Schwartz is based in San Francisco.