Akamai (News - Alert) Technologies, a provider of cloud optimization services, announced a partnership with Riverbed Technology, an IT performance company, to offer a joint solution that overcomes the application performance bottlenecks facing enterprises that leverage public cloud services.

Enterprises are opting for public cloud computing services as a means to avoid costly infrastructure build-out. The service also brings efficiency to business models such as Software as a Service (SaaS (News - Alert)).

Business applications in the cloud that once resided on private networks are being accessed over an often unpredictable public Internet. The hybrid network environment introduces a number of performance, availability, scalability and security issues. As this shift to hybrid networks occurs, ensuring application performance and end-user productivity is critical. This creates a need to integrate access to corporate applications, as well as SaaS, in a single pervasive framework.

Akamai and Riverbed are jointly developing an application acceleration solution for hybrid cloud networks. The solution leverages a combination of Internet optimization and wide area network (WAN) optimization, company officials said.

Under the terms of the agreement, Akamai Internet optimization software would be integrated within Riverbed (News - Alert) Steelhead appliances. The combined offering will extend Internet optimizations into enterprise networks, thereby extending Akamai's edge from close proximity to the data center to directly within the enterprise, company officials said.

Additionally Riverbed WAN optimization software would be integrated within Akamai edge servers with the goal of extending WAN optimization into the public cloud. This would extend Riverbed's edge from the data center to close proximity to cloud data centers.

“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, in a statement.

“The alliance is focused on marrying best-in-class protocol optimizations for maximum acceleration and infrastructure offload,” Tejada added. “Together, both companies expect to provide a seamless solution with quick time-to-value while leveraging each other's existing footprints.”

More than 13,000 customers are already using the solutions from Akamai and Riverbed separately. Akamai's globally distributed network of more than 90,000 servers are 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 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, in a statement.

“Accelerating software as a service, for example, across a hybrid cloud environment helps businesses increase application adoption,” Wolford added. “We believe that greater adoption means improved business results, operating and infrastructure savings, and user productivity.” Recently Riverbed Technology introduced an enhanced architecture for its Cascade network performance management (NPM) solution. The new NPM solution integrates the application-aware NPM functionality of Cascade Profiler with the Cascade Shark network traffic recording appliance and Cascade Pilot network analysis software.

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