The company plans to incorporate Netli’s bi-nodal internet content delivery network and proprietary protocol optimization technology into its own network, rather than operating them entirely separately.
We will likely combine some of what they have with some of what we have, Akamai vice president of product management Rich Kennelly said. Whether it rolls out as two solutions or one solution remains to be seen.
Akamai’s network, built out during the dot-com boom, was designed to speed the delivery of relatively heavy web content, like images and video, from 20,000 servers deployed on about 1,000 networks.
The servers where basically content caches, and end users browsers were pointed to the Akamai network using regular DNS pointers at the origin site.
Netli was formed about five years ago as a direct competitor to Akamai, but using a network topography that requires servers to be deployed at the origin site and at a much smaller number of edge locations.
Origin site servers would intercept web traffic, which tends to be quite chatty, compress it into a much smaller number of HTTP sessions, convert it to a proprietary protocol, then send it to the edge server, which would unwrap it for the end user.
This cuts down on the number of internet backbone trips that a page request has to make, removing the latency those round-trips would have introduced.
While Netli also got into straightforward content caching – Akamai’s original business – in 2005, both companies have increasingly targeted enterprises that want to speed up the performance of applications delivered over the WAN.
Netli’s approach is arguably more suited to this type of implementation, as the company has in fact argued in the past, given the bi-nodal nature of its network.
It seems likely that Netli’s flagship services will somehow be integrated with Akamai’s existing Web Application Accelerator service.
The acquisition increases Akamai’s degree of competition with the likes of Cisco Systems Inc and F5 Networks Inc, two of the larger companies offering application delivery optimization as appliances rather than services.
Aside from the Netli infrastructure and customer base, Akamai also acquires a relationship, announced last May, with Verizon Communications Inc, whose Application Acceleration Suite is and OEM version of the Netli service.
Akamai already has a relationship with Verizon, something the merged companies want to retain, Akamai spokesperson Jeff Young said yesterday.
In August last year Netli told us that, on the back of the Verizon deal, it intended to expand its offerings and move deeper into the enterprise market, which would mean optimizing and accelerating enterprise application protocols beyond HTTP.
To date, however, it has stuck pretty closely to its original remit of Web-enabled content and services, which while they are a growing percentage of overall enterprise environments, must still coexist with client-server apps, often running over proprietary protocols like Citrix.
