Akamai tailors web performance solutions for SaaS providers

Akamai’s Web Performance Solutions are already widely in use by SaaS providers around the globe. For example, 18 of the top 20, and 27 of the top 50 SaaS providers trust Akamai to provide enterprise-grade reliability, industry-leading application acceleration and optimisation, and the security required to protect SaaS applications from DDoS attacks and data theft.

With the introduction of the SaaS Provider Option, Akamai is delivering new capabilities intended to address the unique technical and business requirements that SaaS providers face when delivering applications to global users via the Internet. The SaaS Provider Option enables SaaS Providers to more rapidly on-board new customers, reduce operational costs, speed time-to-market, leverage SSL in a scalable manner, and gain deeper customer insights. Greater business flexibility and efficiency will be critical for SaaS providers given that, according to IDC, by 2018, over $1 of every $5 spent on packaged software, and over $1 of every $4 spent on applications, will be consumed via the cloud; further, about 30% of all new business software purchases will be of service-enabled software, and cloud software will constitute about 20.5% of all software sold and about 19.0% of all applications spending.

One early user of the SaaS Provider Option is Xero. As a global leader in online accounting software Xero provides an intuitive, easy-to-use cloud accounting platform that gives small businesses the real-time financial insights they need to make smart business decisions anywhere, anytime. Xero is positioned for strong global growth and passed $100M in annualized committed monthly revenue recently.

“From day one, Xero always aspired to be a truly global SaaS business,” explained Paul Rushworth, Xero’s Head Platform Infrastructure Architect. “We knew that we needed a Content Delivery Network solution that could match our scale ambitions, and have the global network that we required.”

The SaaS Provider Option is designed to provide value in three distinct areas:
· Faster Provisioning – Decreasing the amount of time required to spin up new customers is directly related to reducing operational costs and decreasing time-to-market. Faster provisioning is designed to help SaaS providers achieve these goals. Accomplished through a new set of open APIs, the SaaS Provider Option is intended to help rapidly and easily onboard new customers as well as leverage SSL in a highly scalable manner.
· Granular Reporting – The ability for SaaS providers to troubleshoot any potential performance or reliability issues, and provide customer specific value confirmation to their customers is important to achieving overall customer satisfaction. SaaS providers can now gain the necessary deep reporting visibility and insight into each of their SaaS customers’ experience to make this a reality. Reports are updated automatically as new customers are provisioned, offering SaaS providers an always up-to-date picture of their business. .
· User-based Billing – SaaS providers can now take advantage of a first-of-its-kind user-based billing model for Akamai services. The user-based billing model is an optional unit of measure, which enables SaaS providers to align their consumption of Akamai’s Web Performance Solutions with their user-based business model.
Another innovative company taking advantage of the capabilities introduced in the SaaS Provider option is Market Logic. They use the SaaS model to deliver an insights platform for companies to systematically use past research in future marketing decisions. According to Olaf Lenzmann, Market Logic CTO, “In addition to the performance and reliability benefits offered by Akamai’s Web Performance Solutions, the new SaaS Provider Option provides a number of benefits directly related to how we do business. Specifically, the ability to quickly and easily add new customers, with the click of the mouse, offers the agility companies like ours want in the cloud era.”

“Consumers of SaaS applications expect their applications to be accessible, perform well, and be as secure as possible. Akamai has been delivering on these requirements for SaaS providers and their customers for several years now,” said Mike Afergan, senior vice president and general manager, Web Experience Business Unit, Akamai. “With our new SaaS Provider Option, Akamai is combining the performance, optimisation and security capabilities for which the company is well known with new capabilities designed specifically to help our SaaS customers run their businesses more efficiently.”