Akamai unveils Open Platform Initiative, announces pact with Cisco

• Open Platform Initiative intended to create more opportunities for community collaboration and innovation
• Akamai and Cisco to utilise the Internet as a fast, reliable, cost-effective WAN option

AKAMAI Technologies Inc has introduced the Akamai Open Platform Initiative and also announced plans for future integration of Akamai Unified Performance technology into the Cisco ISR-AX series of routers.

At the company’s sixth annual Edge customer conference, Akamai said that the Open Platform Initiative was designed to give customers and partners the ability to more easily architect for Akamai services.
 
The set of programs and components that comprise the Open Platform Initiative is intended to create more opportunities for community collaboration and innovation, and provide deeper visibility into and greater control of how enterprises interact with Akamai technology, the company said in a statement.
 
“Offering our customers and partners the right technology and the freedom to use it in compelling ways are at the foundation of the Akamai Open Platform Initiative,” said Rick McConnell, president of products and development at Akamai.
 
“The ability to use the power of the Akamai Intelligent Platform enables developers to take advantage of emerging Internet opportunities and create innovative web experiences optimised for their customers,” he added.
 
Meanwhile, Akamai and Cisco said they intend to co-develop enterprise network offerings aimed at delivering the world’s first enterprise WAN (wide area network) and Internet optimisation solution to provide a secure, high-quality end user experience for both public and private cloud applications to all remote offices.
 
Akamai Unified Performance technology caches and delivers content in-branch through a connection to the Akamai Intelligent Platform. This may be an enterprise’s own digital content or other content delivered by Akamai, which consistently delivers 15% to 30% of all Web traffic.
 
The Akamai solution is also capable of transparently caching other third-party content from top domains, the company claimed.

“Akamai and Cisco share a common vision of improving the speed and reliability of the Internet to provide enterprises with a very cost-effective way to meet the bandwidth and performance needs of branch offices,” said Akamai chief executive officer Tom Leighton (pic).
 
"Our ultimate goal is to integrate best of breed technology from the two industry leaders in networking and application delivery and enable customers to extend the strength of our platform behind their firewall.”
 
The two companies intend to combine the power of Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN), which includes Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) and Application Visibility and Control (AVC), with Akamai Unified Performance to extend the corporate data centre and the Akamai Intelligent Platform into the branch, specifically to offload existing network links and improve performance for web and business critical applications.
 
“With the proliferation of public and hybrid cloud architectures, Cisco and Akamai customers face the need to increase bandwidth and deliver business critical applications utilising the Internet as a fast, secure, and cost effective WAN option,” said Rob Soderbery, senior vice president and general manager of the Cisco Enterprise Networking Group.
 
“We are looking forward to integrating Akamai's exciting new branch capabilities into the industry leading application delivery platform, the Cisco ISR-AX. With our joint product development plan, Cisco and Akamai have taken a big step toward delivering the optimal branch experience,” he added.
 
The intent of both Akamai and Cisco is to utilise the Internet as a fast, reliable, cost-effective WAN option to address the exploding traffic requirements on corporate networks and deal with the architectural challenges hybrid clouds impose on traditional hub–and-spoke networks.
 
 
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