Accelerated Performance from SaaS Applications for Higher End User Productivity

As companies place greater importance on software as a service (SaaS) products like Salesforce.com and Office 365, these applications become a key component of corporate business strategy, productivity and employee collaboration. As such, the capability and flexibility of enterprise infrastructure becomes mission critical but, uniquely with these Internet based services, enterprises now must also consider the public Internet as an extension of this infrastructure. In this new SaaS use case, enterprises are forced to tackle the new challenge of “hybrid network” cloud computing.

The reliance of enterprises and organizations on this hybrid cloud solution amplifies application bottlenecks; specifically network latency, handling data loads, and overcoming protocol inefficiencies. These key obstacles for delivering application performance and productivity must be addressed if SaaS is going to provide the ROI that is has promised. Moving the origin of the application onto the public internet (the SaaS provider’s origin) puts enterprise end users who work at the datacenter, branch offices and other remote locations even farther away from their data and applications.

To solve this problem, Riverbed and Akamai have partnered to deliver the Steelhead Cloud Accelerator, a solution that combines the best of breed in public internet optimization with the best of breed in private wide area network (WAN) optimization

Integrating Akamai’s globally distributed Intelligent Platform, which optimizes traffic across the public internet, with Riverbed award winning RiOS® (Riverbed Optimization System) technology to accelerate the associated data and application protocols, the Steelhead Cloud Accelerator delivers optimized performance for SaaS applications regardless of whether the end user is located at the corporate headquarters or in a geographically remote branch office. By hosting Riverbed RiOS technology on Akamai’s Edge Platform the partnered solution enables the seamless optimization of WAN and public networks, all the way to the front door of the SaaS application provider.

Some of what sets Steelhead Cloud Accelerator apart from the competition include:

Accelerate SaaS Performance.Software as a service (SaaS) applications are faced with the constraints of network latency and limited bandwidth as their data is delivered to users spread around the world. The Steelhead Cloud Accelerator accelerates public cloud services like SaaS just like it does for WAN applications.

Transparent deployment. The Steelhead Cloud Accelerator requires no configuration change on the SaaS service or on the end user’s machine and runs transparently to both, minimizing administration overhead.

Combine the best Internet optimization with the best WAN optimization. Akamai’s Sure Route technology finds the best route between the end user and the SaaS provider, often minimizing transit for data to a single network hop. This combined with Riverbed deduplication and application acceleration technology makes enterprises feel like they are hosting SaaS applications within their own data centers.

Leverage Akamai’s deployment footprint. Use Akamai’s hundreds of thousands of content servers to get as close to the SaaS provider’s data center as possible for complete end-to-end optimization of data from the service provider’s gateway direct to the enterprise user.