Akamai and Riverbed Align on Hybrid Cloud Acceleration

Akamai Technologies and Riverbed Technology announced a strategic alliance to develop enterprise application acceleration solutions that leverage public cloud services. The partnership combines Akamai's global network of edge servers with Akamai's expertise in WAN acceleration. The planned solution would be designed to accelerate cloud-based applications.



Akamai's globally-distributed network of more than 90,000 servers deployed in the cloud provides route, protocol and application layer optimizations for the Internet, and serves roughly 30 percent of all Web traffic.



Riverbed has thousands of appliances deployed within enterprise networks providing network, application and storage optimizations for the WAN.



The companies said they will integrate Akamai Internet optimization software within Riverbed Steelhead appliances, thereby extending Akamai's edge from close proximity to the data center to directly within the enterprise. In addition, Riverbed WAN optimization software would be integrated within Akamai edge servers with the goal of extending WAN optimization into the public cloud, thereby extending Riverbed's edge from the data center to close proximity to cloud data centers.



"The rapid move to the cloud presents new opportunities for two industry leaders, Riverbed and Akamai, to create solutions for enterprises to simplify their extension to the cloud while leveraging the infrastructure they already have in place," said Eric Wolford, executive vice president of Marketing and Business Development, Riverbed. "Accelerating software as a service, for example, across a hybrid cloud environment helps businesses increase application adoption. We believe that greater adoption means improved business results, operating and infrastructure savings, and user productivity."



"Akamai's highly-distributed architecture is close to any public cloud infrastructure and Riverbed Steelhead appliances stretch across thousands of enterprise IT networks from the data center to the branch office and mobile worker," said Willie Tejada, vice president, Application and Site Acceleration, Akamai.



The joint offering is expected to be available early in 2012.http://www.riverbed.com/akamaihttp://www.akamai.com/riverbed