AQUA WEB SOLUTIONS: PRODUCT BRIEF

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A tightly integrated performance suite that adds critical intelligence to Akamais best-of-breed acceleration solutions to deliver a high quality end-user experience, whatever the situation.

Customers and prospects expect fast, quality web experiences independent of the browser, device, technology or network they use. Failure to deliver rich, engaging and fast web experiences can result in lower revenues and higher costs. As dynamic, personalized web sites give way to easily available web experiences, performance optimization can no longer be a one-size-ts-all proposition. The proliferation of connected devices and the rise in application complexity required to deliver a meaningful user experience demands a new kind of intelligent performance optimization solution that will meet the rising expectations of connected end-users.
The web has changed. End-users no longer go online while sitting at their computer they are online everywhere and most of the time. They now consume content using native applications on their tablet from the kitchen, consider entertainment options on their connected TV, or, check live trafc updates on their cars console. The uniqueness of these various user contexts characterizes a shift from personalized, browser-based web sites to a more ubiquitous web experience, enabling consumers to connect whenever and however is most convenient. This evolution requires a shift in how web performance is optimized and measured. Its no longer enough to accelerate dynamic web content in a homogenous way for all users. Intelligence and interoperability are necessary to deliver an effective set of real-time, interrelated and layered optimizations that result in an optimal end-user experience based on the unique situation and context. Akamai refers to this intelligent, real-time web-experience based optimization as situational performance. Companies that dont consider situational performance will fail to capitalize on the fundamental shift of how businesses connect with their customers online. Failing to meet rising end-user web experience expectations can result in lost revenue, rising cost and brand damage.

BUSINESS BENEFITS
Reduce the complexity of delivering  web experiences
 Improve performance intelligently

based on user situation

 Avoid need to expertly code every

situation optimally
 Increase performance benet with

a layered performance solution

 Gain control across online channels,

including connected mobile devices

 Overcome limitations of delivery into

mobile networks Better business results through faster web experiences

 Deliver fast, engaging sites optimized

Recent trends show an increasing diversity of browsers, devices and platforms. The explosive growth in mobile is a trend that we expect to continue through much of this decade. Users are increasingly carrying multiple devices capable of browser-based access to the Internet, including smartphones, tablets and laptop computers often with three different operating systems and three different browser technologies.
Gartner, Web Development in a Multibrowser, Multidevice World

to mobile or desktop
 Tailor experiences to an end-users

situation for maximum user engagement

 Increase conversions and reduce abandon-

ment across engagement channels

 Increase transactions through uninter-

rupted availability
 Provide scalability and performance

under peak trafc conditions Greater infrastructure efciency

 Re-Focus development efforts on core

business needs
 Reduce costs of expensive application

and database tiers

 Deliver quality experiences across

all geographies
Increase processing ofoad

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Akamai Aqua Ion Akamai AQUA Ion is the rst situational performance solution a tightly integrated suite of delivery, acceleration, and optimization technologies with the required intelligence to make real-time web experience optimization decisions based on the requirements of the given situation. Aqua Ion, the third generation of Akamais acclaimed site acceleration solution still delivers consistent acceleration to all users while providing ofoad to backend data systems, but in addition introduces layers of intelligence to help optimize the web experience for key situational components including: 1. Cellular or xed-line delivery infrastructure 2. Device characteristics 3. Browser type 4. Third-party content and services Aqua Ion helps businesses mitigate the ever-growing challenges of delivering diverse web experiences while ensuring the highest quality web experiences for their customers.. Aqua Ion is built on Akamais Intelligent Platform, the global cloud computing platform purpose designed for performance, scale, security and control of web experiences delivered over the public internet. Aqua Ion simplies the complexity of modern web delivery while delivering a faster experience that is highly available, secure and scalable to meet peak capacity demands backed by Akamais industry leading performance and availability Service Level Agreement. Aqua Ion provides an integrated, pervasive cloud computing platform that extends your companys existing data and application infrastructure to ensure you deliver fast, quality web experiences regardless of how, where and when end-users choose to connect. For best-in-class acceleration this intelligent, layered approach to performance optimization is tailored to the individual end-users context.

AQUA WEB SOLUTIONS: PRODUCT BRIEF

Situational Performance Highlights Akamai Front-End Optimization For businesses looking to deliver the richest, most engaging user experiences possible, Aqua Ion offers a fully automated solution for situational performance by including Akamai Front-End Optimization (FEO). Akamai FEO adaptively applies optimization techniques for each end user, based on sophisticated analysis of the web application as well as real-time conditions specic to the end-users environment, such as browser, device, network speed and usage of third-party services. Akamai customers can quickly and easily enjoy the full benets of FEO best practices without having to become FEO experts, and without having to make any changes to their Akamaized site. The dozen optimizations available at launch are constantly rened and expanded. The benets of these optimizations can be broadly categorized as follows:  Reduce HTTP requests, using techniques like request consolidation and local browser caching, in order to minimize the overhead associated with each request.  Reduce required bytes delivered, by adaptively compressing images and minimizing code without affecting site functionality or visual quality.  Accelerate page rendering, by delaying non-essential tasks that might otherwise block the page load. These techniques are critical, for example, to prevent slow third-party code from spoiling the user experience. As an integrated component in Akamais highly secure Intelligent Platform, the application code optimizations work in concert with Akamais other performance, security, and availability offerings. Aqua Ion brings together dynamic acceleration to deliver every byte faster, with optimizations that prioritize and reduce the number of bytes requested and the number of requests necessary to deliver those bytes. Together, they offer unparalleled responsiveness for end users across devices and networks, offering an

Rethink your approach to web scaling to include optimization services. Growth in user populations, devices, and dynamic content are each ramping up and make your top challenge scaling up your web capacity and performance.
Forrester Consulting Shifting Performance Strategies And Solutions For Mobile And Web Delivery

exceptionally rich and responsive experience across devices and networks. Dynamic Page Caching Situational performance includes the need to deliver performance based on user behavior. Aqua Ion includes congurable options available through the Akamai Luna Control Center that enables more granular and intelligent caching of dynamic and personalized content based on user segmentation. By conditionally caching these objects, Dynamic Page Caching can provide greatly improved page load performance and signicant infrastructure ofoad, which can lower asset utilization and licensing costs while improving performance. IPv6 Adaptation As the number of IP devices continues to grow, a greater number of situations require support for the latest Internet Protocol, known as IPv6. Akamai IPv6 Adaptation ensures that customers can continue to deliver their Web sites using IPv6, even when their infrastructure has not been upgraded from the legacy IPv4 standard. This provides organizations with the exibility to plan and execute an IPv6 rollout strategy that can be subject to internal scal, security and business process scrutiny.

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Dynamic and Personalized Performance Optimizing the Network Aqua Ion continuously pulls and caches fresh content onto servers that are closest to the end user. Our dynamic mapping system directs user requests for application content to the optimal Akamai edge server, depending on their location and transaction type, even for requests coming from mobile networks. Then, through Akamai route optimization known as Sure Route we identify a fast, reliable path back to your data center to retrieve dynamic/interactive content. We use several connection techniques to optimize communications between the Akamai edge server and your origin infrastructure to deliver dynamic content using optimized connections that avoid Internet problem spots. Enhanced Akamai Protocol Aqua Ion provides signicant enhancements to increase efciencies at the TCP layer when xed-line networks are congested. With Enhanced Akamai Protocol, customers who demand the very best speed and ofoad can take advantage of the most aggressive mapping and networking protocol optimizations Akamai has to offer, helping further increase performance. Akamai Instant Many variables can affect how quickly or how slowly a user is presented with a page in response to an action taken in a browser. Akamai Instant retrieves the next pages most likely to be requested, based on origin analytics, before the user selects it for viewing. This helps overcome long think time challenges caused by web service calls, database lookups, or other calculations that slow down application response time and speeds the overall delivery of pages throughout the application. It creates cache intelligence that spans user behaviors, not just a single webpage. Proven Akamai Technologies Aqua Ion consolidates many of Akamais proven innovations in a single intelligent solution, combining the ability to scale to meet peak user demand when needed, helping organizations avoid expensive infrastructure build-out. Aqua Ion also includes access to the newly revised Luna Control Center, a dashboard-like customer conguration and reporting center that provides greater visibility into your audiences, along with the tools to optimize their web experience.

AQUA WEB SOLUTIONS: PRODUCT BRIEF

Aqua Ion Mobile (optional) Adaptive Image Compression User satisfaction with their experience is partially dependent on unpredictable delivery networks and when those networks are overloaded with users and data, that experience begins to degrade. Adaptive Image Compression is designed to vary the level of compression for .jpeg images based on real-time network conditions, meaning pages should load much faster even when network conditions are poor. The result is an optimized and improved experience that is intelligently responsive to real-time network conditions and the users situation. Device Characterization Device Characterization allows companies to make real-time decisions about the specic web experience delivered to a site visitor based on the capabilities of that end-users device. Using information derived from the browsers user agent, the Akamai Intelligent Platform is able to decipher many characteristics of the requesting device such as screen size, GPS for location-based services, Javascript support, and many more. These characteristics are then made available as part of the user request, allowing companies to make intelligent decisions regarding how to respond to a particular request. Importantly, specic caching rules based on specic device characteristics, so that the page delivered in each situation can be optimized, providing both improved user experience and reduced page weight, which can help improve the time to deliver the experience. Mobile Detection and Redirect Using a constantly updated user agent database hosted on the Akamai edge, incoming HTTP requests are evaluated and, optionally, device characteristics are discerned. Redirection responses can then be issued from an Akamai edge server close to the end-user, to the appropriate mobile site for smartphones, feature phones, tablets and other portable devices, dramatically improving response times. IT organizations are relieved from implementing and managing large and costly databases identifying thousands of device types and characteristics, along with the programming logic to automatically detect and redirect these devices to the appropriate Web site. Enhanced Mobile Protocol Using real-time connection sensing to apply optimizations for both cellular and Wi-Fi connections, Akamai is able to help overcome the high-latency and packet loss associated with mobile delivery. By supporting features such as HTTP pipelining, Aqua Ion can help overcome poor performance introduced in cellular networks, helping users of mobile devices enjoy improved quality of experience. These optimizations help improve performance of both mobile Web sites, and mobile applications utilizing network connections. The result is shorter time to receive data initially and fewer opportunities to drop data connections, which can lead to an overall improved user experience.

Achieving reliable performance that meets web and mobile user expectations is critical to business success.
Forrester Consulting Shifting Performance Strategies And Solutions For Mobile And Web Delivery

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AQUA WEB SOLUTIONS: PRODUCT BRIEF

Akamaiis the leading cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere. At the core of the companys solutions is the Akamai Intelligent Platform providing extensive reach, coupled with unmatched reliability, security, visibility and expertise.Akamai removes the complexities of connecting the increasingly mobile world, supporting 24/7 consumer demand,andenabling enterprises to securely leverage the cloud.To learn more about how Akamai is accelerating the pace of innovation in ahyperconnectedworld, please visitwww.akamai.com and follow @Akamai on Twitter. Asia Pacic Headquarters European Headquarters North American Headquarters 1 Rafes Place, #16 61 One Rafes Place, Singapore 048616 Pngstweidstrasse 60, 8005, Zurich, Switzerland 8 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States 02142 Tel +65.6593.8700 Tel +41.43.210.91.00 Tel +1.617.444.3000 Fax +65.6593.8799 Fax +41.43.210.91.01 Fax +1.617.444.3001

2012 Akamai Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission is prohibited. Akamai and the Akamai wave logo are registered trademarks. Other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners. Akamai believes that the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date; such information is subject to change without notice.