Akamai's Web Application Accelerator Solution Proves a Strategic Value-add to SaaS Companies

Tradebeam Doubles Performance and Cuts Transaction Times in Half with Akamai's Web Application Accelerator

CAMBRIDGE, MA, June 4, 2009 -- Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leader in powering rich media, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, announced today that TradeBeam, the leading SaaS platform for Global Trade Management, has improved the performance and availability of its Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings, and allowed the company to avoid more than 20 percent in additional capital expenditures to build international data centers through Akamai's Web Application Accelerator solution.

TradeBeam's SaaS offering provides more than 6,000 organizations with import and export compliance, inventory management, shipment tracking, supply-chain event management, and global trade finance solutions. With customers all over the world connecting to their system, it is critical to be able to provide data security and protection, ensure availability of their software, and ensure a fast and consistent experience for end users, anytime, anywhere in the world.

"We need to ensure that all users, whether in the US, EMEA, or Asia-Pacific, experience the highest level of service possible in terms of availability and speed," said Nasser Mirzai, vice president of technology at TradeBeam. "Working with Akamai allows us to deliver the same or better service levels to our global customers as a managed service. This was achieved with no additional infrastructure investment." TradeBeam's market-leading Global Trade Management software solution helps companies streamline their global trading processes. The solution, delivered via the SaaS model, requires no upfront hardware or software investments, leading to significantly faster ROI. Ensuring the proper management of import and export processes and related supply chain activities requires TradeBeam's solutions to facilitate interactions with many companies, across multiple geographies. Akamai's Web Application Accelerator accelerates these mission-critical business solutions to global end users, providing performance and availability as though the applications were installed on site.

"Akamai has seen incredible growth in SaaS vendors and SaaS traffic on our platform. We have added 50 percent more SaaS customers on the Akamai platform in the last year, and in the last three years, we've experienced almost 20X growth in SaaS traffic," said Willie Tejada, vice president, Application and Site Acceleration, Akamai. "We have also seen our international SaaS traffic go from 25 to 40 percent of total SaaS traffic in the last year, demonstrating how important it is for global SaaS vendors to have an effective strategy for international delivery of their applications."

Source: Akamai Technologies