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Citrix and Akamai Collaborate to Enhance Web Application Delivery for Enterprise Customers Worldwide
Thursday 22. May 2008 - Web Application Delivery Powerhouses Form Global Strategic Partnership to Provide End-to-End Application Delivery Solution
Today at Citrix Synergy, the event where virtualization, networking and application delivery meet, Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, and Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leader in powering rich media, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, announced an agreement that will make it easier for customers and integration partners to combine each companys web application delivery offerings into integrated solutions that enhance the performance, scalability and security of enterprise web applications. The companies will leverage Citrixs premise-based NetScaler product line and Akamais cloud-based Web Application Accelerator(SM) service to bring true end-to-end web application delivery to both Internet and enterprise customers worldwide.
As the boundary between “applications” and “content” continues to blur, customers increasingly need a blend of delivery solutions that work together seamlessly to ensure the lowest cost of ownership for IT and a great experience for end users. The increased adoption of interactive Web 2.0 applications coupled with the explosion of rich media content puts even more pressure on existing network and application infrastructures, requiring easy interoperability between premise-based and cloud-based delivery solutions. Enterprises can no longer tolerate a patchwork of solutions from non-aligned IT vendors as they attempt to build an end-to-end infrastructure for delivering these web applications to end users.
“This initiative is strategic for both Akamai and Citrix as it marks the beginning of a close collaboration between two market leaders that will focus on optimizing total cost of ownership and performance experiences for customers via a new class of application delivery controller services,” said Mark Templeton, president and chief executive officer of Citrix Systems. “Optimization of the user experience will happen in the datacenter, at the edge of the network and in the Internet cloud, allowing IT to deliver any application to any user with the best performance, security and cost savings possible.”
“Todays enterprise, dependent on the Internet to serve a global audience of customers, partners, and employees, has made optimized application delivery a top priority,” said Paul Sagan, president and CEO of Akamai. “Together, Akamai and Citrix solutions create one end-to-end solution that allows customers to maximize their investment quickly while benefitting from faster application performance, greater infrastructure scalability, higher application availability and deeper application security.”
Citrix and Akamai are responding to this challenge by working with leading system integrators to bring customers the following benefits:
Faster Web Application Performance: Delivering a superior user experience by deploying Citrix NetScalers powerful acceleration capabilities in the datacenter, and by eliminating performance bottlenecks outside the datacenter with Akamais advanced Internet communications protocol optimizations.
Greater Infrastructure Scalability: Supporting more applications and more users by offloading expensive processing from web server infrastructure using a combination of optimization, connection management, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption and sophisticated content caching.
Higher Application Availability: Maintaining superior application availability despite adverse Internet traffic conditions and delays by routing application requests to the most available resource within the datacenter, and across worldwide datacenters.
Deeper Application Security: Establishing dual-zone application protection by detecting and blocking attacks, such as denial of service (DoS) threats and Structured Query Language (SQL) injection exploits, via a web application firewall, as well as securing in-transit application data.
“This announcement is recognition of the strategic importance of application delivery,” said Cindy Borovick, Research Vice President, IDC. “The combined solution will give IT organizations the confidence that they are deploying a solution that addresses the complete spectrum of application delivery requirements, from the data center to the application user.”
“Enterprise IT departments seeking to optimize application performance and availability in the data center and in the Internet cloud will welcome the results of this collaboration,” said Rey Buccat, director of IT for Qualcomm. “We independently invested significant resources to integrate, test and deploy these two best-of breed-solutions, gaining greater application performance, availability, visibility and security than either solution can offer alone.”
As part of the collaboration between Citrix and Akamai, the companies intend to establish the following:
Citrix-Akamai Partner Assistance Program – designed to help integrators establish practices to implement the two solutions together at customer sites. The industry can look forward to leading integrators announcing solutions in the coming months.
Citrix-Akamai Online Community – designed to help enterprise customers share best practices, experiences and support questions when using Citrix and Akamai web application delivery solutions together. The two companies will also publish a series of best practices deployment guides showing recommended configuration guidelines to achieve the best possible application performance for various scenarios.
Citrix and Akamai are both recognized market leaders in application delivery. Citrix NetScaler web application delivery solutions are purpose-built appliances that accelerate application performance, while simultaneously reducing datacenter costs and improving web application security. The new NetScaler MPX reduces datacenter costs by delivering twice as many web applications with the same infrastructure footprint. Akamais Web Application Accelerator service speeds the performance of dynamic, interactive web applications by transforming the Internet to offer a high-performing, reliable and secure business platform.
The Akamai Difference
Akamai provides market-leading managed services for powering rich media, dynamic transactions, and enterprise applications online. Having pioneered the content delivery market one decade ago, Akamais services have been adopted by the worlds most recognized brands across diverse industries. Akamais global network of tens of thousands of distributed servers provides the scale, reliability, insight and performance for businesses to succeed online. An S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100 company, Akamai has transformed the Internet into a more viable place to inform, entertain, interact, and collaborate. To experience The Akamai Difference, visit www.akamai.com.
Akamai Statement Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act
The release contains information about future expectations, plans and prospects of Akamais management that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors including, but not limited to, changes to Akamais technology or other technologies that would limit the interoperability of Akamais services and those provided by Citrix, termination of the agreement between Akamai and Citrix, inability of systems integrators to work with both companies technologies, the effects of any attempts to intentionally disrupt our services or network by hackers or others, failure to have available sufficient transmission capacity, changes in technologies related to Web-based applications or Akamais managed services, a failure of Akamais network infrastructure, and other factors that are discussed in the Companys Annual Report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and other documents periodically filed with the SEC.