Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the inadequacy of the old one-size-fits-all approach to delivering web content on different devices and different networks.

1. Akamai Offers Situational Approach to Addressing
Challenges Raised by Complex Internet Trends
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the inadequacy of the old one-size-fits-all approach to
delivering web content on different devices and different networks.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Akamai Technologies
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're
listening to BriefingsDirect.
Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the new realities of
delivering applications and content in the cloud and mobile era. We'll examine
how the many variables of modern Internet usage demand a more situational
capability among and between enterprises, clouds, and the many popular end
devices.
That is, major trends have conspired to make inadequate a one-size-fits-all approach to today’s
complex network optimization and applications performance demands. Rather, more web
experiences now need a more real-time and dynamic response tailored and refined to the actual
use and specifics of that user’s task.
We're here with an executive from Akamai Technologies to spotlight the trends leading to this
new dynamic cloud to mobile network reality and to evaluate ways to make all web experiences
remain valued, appropriate, and performant.
With that, please join me now in welcoming our guest. We're here with Mike Afergan. He is the
Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Web Experience Business Unit at Akamai
Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Welcome back, Mike.
Michael Afergan: Hi. Thanks, Dana.
Gardner: There are these trends that seem to be spurring a different web, a need for a different
type of response, given the way that people are using the web differently. Let’s start at the top.
What are the trends, and what do you mean by a situational response to ameliorating this new
level of complexity?
Afergan: There are a number of trends, and I'll highlight a few. There’s clearly been a significant
change, and you and I see it in our daily lives in how we, as consumers and employees, interact
with this thing that we call the web.
Only a few years ago, most of us interacted with the web by sitting in front of the PC, typing on
a keyboard and with a mouse. Today, a large chunk, if not a majority, of our interaction with the

2. web is through different handheld devices or tablets, wi-fi, and through cellular connections.
More and more it's through different modes of interaction.
For example, Siri is a leader in having us speak to the web and ask questions of the
web verbally, as opposed to using a keyboard or some sort of touch-screen device.
So there are some pretty significant trends in terms of how we interact as
consumers or employees, particularly with devices and cellular connectivity.
Behind the scenes there’s a lot of other pretty significant changes. The way that
websites have been developed has significantly changed. They're using technology such as
JavaScript and CSS in a much heavier way than ever before.
Third-party content
We're also seeing websites pull in a variety of content from third parties. Even though you're
going to a website, and it looks like it’s a website of a given retailer,
more often than not a large chunk of what you are seeing on that page is
actually coming from their business partners or other people that they
are working with, which gets integrated and displayed to you.
We're seeing cellular end devices as a big trend on the experience side.
We're seeing a number of things happen behind the scenes. What that means is that the web, as
we thought about it even a few years ago, is a fundamentally different place today. Each of these
interactions with the web is a different experience and these interactions are very different.
A user in Tokyo on a tablet, over a cellular connection, interacting with the website is a very
different experience situation than me at my desk in Cambridge, in front of my PC right now
with fixed connectivity. This is very different than me or you this evening driving home, with an
iPhone or a handheld device, and maybe talking to it via Siri.
Each of these are very different experiences and each of these are what I call different situations.
If we want to think about technology around performance and we want to think technology
involving Internet, we have to think about these different situations and what technologies are
going to be the most appropriate and most beneficial for these different situations.
Gardner: So we have more complexity on the delivery side, perhaps an ecosystem of different
services coming together, and we also have more devices, and then of course different networks.
And as people think about the cloud, I think the missing word in the cloud is the network. There
are many networks involved here.
Maybe you could help us understand with these trends that delivery is a function of many
different services, but also many different networks. How does that come together?

3. Afergan: There are some trends in which the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The way the Internet works fundamentally hasn’t changed. The Internet is still, to use the
terminology from over a decade ago, a network of networks. The way that data travels across the
Internet behind the scenes is by moving through different networks. Each of those has different
operating principles in terms of how they run, and there are always challenges moving from one
network to another.
This is why, from the beginning, Akamai has always had a strategy of deploying our services and
our servers as close to the users as possible. This is so that, when you and I make a request to a
website, it doesn't have to traverse multiple networks, but rather is served from an Akamai
location as close as possible to you.
And even when you have to go all the way across the Internet, for example, to buy something
and submit a credit card, we're finding an intelligent path across the network. That's always been
true at the physical network layer, but as you point out, this notion of networks is being expanded
for content providers, websites, and retailers. Think about the set of companies that they work
with and the other third parties that they work with almost as a network, as an ecosystem, that
really comes together to develop and ultimately create the content that you and I see.
This notion of having these third party application programming interfaces (APIs) in the cloud is
a very powerful trend for enterprises that are building websites, but it also obviously creates a
number of challenges, both technical and operational, in making sure that you have a reliable,
scalable, high-performing web experience for your users.
Big data
Gardner: I suppose another big trend nowadays -- we've mentioned mobile and cloud -- is this
notion of analytics, big data, trying to be more intelligent, a word you used a moment ago. Is
there something about the way that the web has evolved that's going to allow for more gathering
of information about what's actually taking place on the networks and these end devices and then
therefore be able to better serve up or produce value as time goes on?
Is the intelligence something that we can measure. Is there a data aspect to this that comes into
that situational benefit path?
Afergan: One of the big challenges in this world of different web experience and situations is a
greater demand for that type of information. Before, typically, a user was on a PC, using one of a
few different types of browsers.
Now, with all these different situations, the need for that intelligence, the need to understand the
situation that your user is in, and potentially the changing situation that your user is in as they
move from one location to another or one device to another is even more important than it was a
few years ago.

4. That's going to be an important trend of understating the situations. Being able to adapt to them
dynamically and efficiently is going to be an important trend for the industry in the next few
years.
Gardner: What does this mean for enterprises? If I'm a company and I recognize that my
employees are going to want more variety and more choice on their devices, I have to deliver
apps out to those devices. I also have to recognize that they don't stop working at five. Therefore,
our opportunity for delivering applications and data isn't time-based. It's more of a situational-
based demand as well.
I don’t think enterprises want to start building out these network capabilities as well as data and
intelligence gathering. So what does it mean for enterprises, as they move towards this different
era of the web, and how should they think about responding?
Afergan: You nailed it with that question. Obviously one of the big trends in the industry right
now, in the enterprise industry, bring your own device (BYOD). You and I and lots of people
listening to this probably see it on a daily basis as we work.
In front of me right now are two different devices that I own and brought into the office today.
Lots of my colleagues do the same. We see that as a big trend across our customer base.
More and more employees are bringing their increasingly powerful devices into the office. More
and more employees want to be able to access their content in the office via those devices and at
home or on the go, on a business trip, over those exact same devices, the way we've become
accustomed to for our personal information and our personal experiences online.
Key trends
So the exact same trend that you think about being relevant for consumer-facing websites --
multiple devices, cellular connectivity -- are really key trends that are being driven from the
outside-in, from the employees into the enterprise right now. It’s a challenge for enterprise to be
able to keep up. It’s a challenge for enterprises to be able to adapt to those technologies, just like
it is for consumer websites.
But for the enterprise, you need to make sure that you are mindful of security, authentication, and
a variety of other principles, which are obviously important once you are dealing with enterprise
data.
There’s tremendous opportunity. It is a great trend for enterprises, in terms of empowering their
employees, empowering their partners, decreasing the total cost of ownership for the devices,
and for their users to have access to the information. But it obviously presents some very
significant trends and challenges. Number one, obviously, is keeping up with those trends, but
number two, doing it in a way that’s both authenticated and secure at the same time.

5. Gardner: Based on a lot of the analyst reports that we're seeing, the adoption of cloud services
and software-as-a-service (SaaS) services by enterprises is expected to grow quite rapidly in the
coming years. If I'm an enterprise, whether I'm serving up data and applications to my
employees, my business partners, and/or end consumers, it doesn’t seem to make sense to get
cloud services, bring them into the enterprise, and then send them back out through a network to
those people. It sounds like this is moving from a data center that I control type of a service into
something that’s in the cloud itself as well.
So are we reading that correctly -- that even your bread and butter, Global 2000 enterprise has to
start thinking about network services in this context of a situational web?
Afergan: Exactly. The good news is that most thoughtful enterprises are already doing that. It
doesn’t make it easier overnight, but they're already having those conversations. You're exactly
right. Once you recognize the fact that your employees, your partners are going to want to
interact with these applications on their devices, wherever they may be, you pretty quickly
realize that you can’t build out a dedicated network, a dedicated infrastructure, that’s going to
service them in all the locations that they are going to need to be.
All of a sudden, you're now talking about putting those applications into the cloud, so that those
users can access them on any device, anywhere, anytime. At that point in time, you're now
building to a cloud architecture, which obviously brings a lot of promise and a lot of opportunity,
but then some challenges associated with it.
Gardner: I'll just add one more point on the enterprise, because I track enterprise IT issues more
specifically than the general web. IT service management, service level agreements (SLAs),
governance policy and management via rules that can be repeatable are all very important to IT
as well.
Is there something about a situational network and web delivery that comes to play when it
relates to governance policy and management vis-à-vis rules, I guess what you'd call service-
delivery architecture?
Situational needs
Afergan: That’s a great question, and I've had that conversation with several enterprises. To
some degree, every enterprise is different and every application is somewhat different, which
even makes the situational point you are making all the more true.
For some enterprises, the requirements they have around those applications are ubiquitous and
those need to be held true independent of the situation. In other cases, you have certain
requirements around certain applications that may be different if the employee is on premises,
within your VPN, in your country, or out of the country. All of a sudden, those situations became
all the more complicated.

6. As each of these enterprises that we have been working with think through the challenges that
you just listed, it's very much a situational conversation. How do you build one architecture that
allows you to adapt to those different situations?
Gardner: I think we have described the problem fairly well. It's understood. What do we start
thinking about when it comes to solving this problem? How can we get a handle on these
different types of traffic with complexity and variability on the delivery end, on the network end,
and then on the receiving end, and somehow make it rational and something that could be a
benefit to our business?
Afergan: It's obviously the challenge that we at Akamai spend a lot of time thinking about and
working with our customers on. Obviously, there's no one, simple answer to all of that, but I'll
offer a couple of different pieces.
We believe it requires starting with a good overall, fundamentally sound architecture. That's an
architecture that is globally distributed and gives you a platform where you don't have to -- to
answer some of your earlier questions -- worry about some of the different networks along the
way, and worry about some of the core, fundamental Internet challenges that really haven't
changed since the mid-'90s in terms of reliability and performance of the core Internet.
But then it should allow you to build on top of that for some of the cloud-based and situational-
based challenges that you have today. That requires a variety of technologies that will, number
one, address, and number two, adapt to situations that you're talking about.
Let's go through a couple of the examples that we've already spoken about on this call. If you're
an enterprise worrying about your user on a cellular connection in Hong Kong, versus you're the
same enterprise worrying about the same application for a user on a desktop fixed connection
based in New York City, the performance challenges and the performance optimizations that you
want to make are going to be fundamentally different.
There is a core set of things that you need to have in place in all those cases. You need to have an
intelligent platform that's going to understand the situation and make an appropriate decision
based on that situation. This will include a variety of technical variables, as well as just a general
understanding of what the end user is trying to do.
Gardner: It seems like it wasn't that long ago, Mike, that people said, "I just want to make
things 50 percent faster. I want to make my website speedier." But that's almost an obsolete
question. It's more, "How do I make a specific circumstance perform in a specific way for a
specific user and that might change in five minutes?"
So how do we rethink moving from fatter pipes and faster websites to these new requirements? Is
this a cultural shift? Is it moving from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional picture? How do
we create a metaphor or analogy to better understand the difference and the type of problem we
need to solve?

7. Complicated problem
Afergan: Again, it's a complicated problem. Start again with the good news that the reason
we're having this problem is that there are these powerful situations and powerful opportunities
for enterprises, but the smart enterprises we're working with are asking a couple of different
questions.
First, there is a myriad of situations, but typically you can think about some of them that are the
most important to you to start off with.
The second thing that enterprises are doing thoughtfully is rethinking how you even do
performance measurement. You just gave a great example. Before, you could talk about how do I
make this experience 50 percent faster, and that was a fine conversation.
Now, smart enterprises are saying, "Tell me about the performance of my users in Hong Kong
over cellular connections. Tell me about the performance of my users in New York City over
fixed connections." Then it's understanding the different dimensions and different variables that
are important for you and then measuring performance based on those variables.
I work with several thoughtful enterprises that are going through that transformation of moving
from a one-size-fits-all performance measurement metric to being a lot more thoughtful about
what metrics they care about. Exactly as we've talked about, and exactly as you mentioned, that
one-size-fits-all metric is becoming less relevant by the day.
Gardner: And as we have more moving parts, we perhaps could think about it as a need for a
Swiss Army Knife of some sort, where multiple tools can be brought out quickly and applied to
what's needed. But that needs to be something that's coordinated, not just by the enterprise, the
Internet service provider (ISP), the networks, or the cloud providers, but all of them. Getting
them to line up, or having one throat to choke, if you will, has always been a challenge.
Is there something now, or is there something about Akamai in particular, that gets you in a
neutrality? We mentioned the Swiss Army Knife. Is there some ability for you to get in and be
among and in a positive value development relationship with all of these players that perhaps is
what we are starting to get to when we think about the situational benefit?
Afergan: It's obviously something we spend a lot of time thinking about here. In general, not
just speaking about Akamai for the moment, to be successful here, you need to have a few things.
You need to have an underlying architecture that allows you to operate across a variety of the
parties you mentioned.
For example, we talked about a variety of networks, a variety of ISPs. You need to have one
architecture that allows you to operate across all of them. You can't go and build different
architecture and different solution ISP by ISP, network by network, or country by country.

8. There's no way you're going to build a scalable solution there. So first and foremost, you need
that overall, ubiquitous architecture.
Significant intelligence
The second thing you need is significant intelligence to be able to make those decisions on the
fly, determine what the situation, and what would be the most beneficial solution and technology
applied to that situation.
The third thing you need is the right set of APIs and tools that ultimately allows the enterprise,
the customer, to control what's happening, because across these situations sometimes there is no
absolute right answer. In some cases, you might want to suddenly degrade the fidelity of the
experience to have it be a faster experience for the user.
Across all of these, having the underlying overall architecture that gives you the ubiquity, having
the intelligence that allows you to make decisions in real-time, and having the right APIs and
tools are things that ultimately we at Akamai spend a lot of time worrying about.
We sit in a unique position to offer this to our customers, working closely with them and their
partners. And all of these things, which have been important to us for over a decade now, are
even more important as we sail into this more complicated situationally-driven world.
Gardner: We're almost out of time, but I wonder about on-ramps or adoption paths for
organizations like enterprises to move towards this greater ability to manage the complexity that
we're now facing. Perhaps it’s the drive to mobility, perhaps it’s the consumption of more cloud
services, perhaps it’s the security governance and risk and compliance types issues like that, or
all of the above. Any sense of how people would find the best path to get started and any
recommendations on how to get started?
Afergan: Ultimately, each company has a set of challenges and opportunities that they're
working through at any point in time. For us, it begins with getting on the right platform and
thinking about the key challenges that are driving your business.
Mobility clearly is a key trend that is driving a lot of our customers to understand and appreciate
the challenges of situational performance and then try to adapt it in the right way. How do I
understand what the right devices are? How do I make sure that when a user moves to a less
performing network, I still give them a high quality experience?
For some of our customers, it’s about just general performance across a variety of different
devices and how to take advantage of the fact that I have a much more sophisticated experience
now, where I am not just sending HTML, but am sending JavaScript and things I could execute
on the browser.

9. For some of our customers it's, "Wait a minute. Now, I have all these different experiences. Each
one of these is a great opportunity for my business. Each one of these is a great opportunity for
me to drive revenue. But each one of these is now a security vulnerability for my business, and I
have to make sure that I secure it."
Each enterprise is addressing these in a slightly different way, but I think the key point is
understanding that the web really has moved from basic websites to these much more
sophisticated web experiences.
Varied experiences
The web experiences are varied across different situations and overall web performance is a
key on-ramp. Mobility is another key on-ramp that you, and security would be a third initial
starting point. Some of our customers are trying to take a very complicated problem and look at
it through a much more manageable lens, so they can start moving in the right direction.
Gardner: I am afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been discussing how most cloud
experiences now need a more real-time and dynamic response, perhaps tailored and refined to the
actual use and specifics of a user’s task at hand. And we've heard about how a more situational
capability that takes into account many variables at an enterprise, cloud, and network level, and
then of course across these end devices that are now much more diverse and distributed, all come
together for a new kind of value.
I'd like to thank our guest. We've been here with Mike Afergan, the Senior Vice President and
General Manager of the Web Experience Business Unit at Akamai Technologies.
Thank you so much, Mike.
Afergan: Thanks, Dana. I really appreciated the time.
Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. A big thank you also
to our audience for listening, and don’t forget to come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Akamai Technologies
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the inadequacy of the old one-size-fits-all approach to
delivering web content on different devices and different networks. Copyright Interarbor
Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.
You may also be interested in:
• Akamai Stepping up from CDN to the Cloud
• Akamai Seeks Larger Role in China's Web Security

10. • As Cloud and Mobile Trends Drive User Expectations Higher, Notworks Must Now
Deliver Applications Faster, Safer, Cheaper
• Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast on Media Delivery with Akamai CTO Mike
Afergan
• Focusing on Applications Key to Enabling Strong Security in Emerging Cloud Models