Web Performance News for the Week of December 2, 2013 – LoadStorm

Numerous articles are being delivered to the internet everyday. Not everyone has the time to read every articles of interest to them. To help facilitate updates in the web performance world, here are a series of summaries to keep readers updated.

Akamai Technologies Inc acquires DDOS company Prolexic

Akamai will acquire all of the outstanding equity of Prolexic in exchange for a net cash payment of about $370 million.  The transaction is expected to occur in the first half of 2014. Although Akamai already has a service to protect online companies from DDoS (distributed denial of service )attacks, CEO Tom Leighton informed everyone that Prolexic focused on protecting all manner of enterprise computing systems, such as corporate data centers.

“By joining forces with Prolexic, we intend to combine Akamai’s leading security and performance platform with Prolexic’s highly-regarded DDoS mitigation solutions for data center and enterprise applications protection. We believe that Prolexic’s solutions and team will help us achieve our goal of making the Internet fast, reliable, and secure.” said Leighton.

The deal will continue to grow Akamai’s Internet security business and extending their reach to customers’ data centers and non-web applications, such as e-mail and tools for staff to share digital files.

Federal Communication Commission Releases Its Own Mobile Performance Testing App

FCC has recently unveiled an app called FCC Speed Test App for Android smartphones which is available for free through Google Play. The app is a stepping stone towards evaluating the efficiency of mobile broadband network performance. Speed Test App is aimed at equipping consumers with information to allow them to make fact-based, informed decisions when choosing and evaluating their mobile providers.

Aggregated data collected from the app will continue to help the FCC in its future policy decision making.  The program is based on involving consumer volunteers, the Federal Trade Commission, wireless service providers, and others to produce accurate information on mobile broadband services.By extending to mobile services this will provide valuable information to the public, industry and policy makers on broadband networks across the nation.

Regarding concerns for the app, the FCC stated that consumer privacy is the top priority. The FCC Speed Test page stated,  “We used open, public meetings and worked with a diverse team of privacy experts, including federal partners, academia, and industry stakeholders, to develop our privacy policy and procedures.  Simply put, NO personal information or unique identifiers are collected, data is collected anonymously, and it may be further processed to ensure that consumer privacy is protected.”

New Survey Finds Website Performance a Top Business Priority

Conducted by TechValidate, Limelight Networks announced the results of a recent survey on how businesses are seeing web performance as a top business priority. Businesses are continuing to become more aware of the financial influence of high performance. With the awareness, online businesses are beginning to integrate performance testing into their development cycle. Below are some statistics announced from Limelight Networks.

Based on responses from over 230 Limelight Platform customers, the survey shows that 62% of companies view high performance delivery of content as one of their highest priorities for businesses today.

In terms of top challenges companies face:

• 39% of respondents cited the inability to deliver a consistent user experience across the globe as a top operational challenge.
• 37% cited slow application load times.
• 34% cited buffering of video content.

Unintended traffic spikes is also one of the challenges companies face. According to the survey about 46% of respondents said they experience unplanned traffic spikes at more than two times a year. Half of those companies expect this to happen many times a year.

By Identifying and monitoring the key drivers of their business. Companies perceive web performance as an necessary component for boosting profitability. 48% of customers surveyed stated that their primary reason for addressing the web performance challenge is to retain and grow the customer base, while 25% cited increasing visitor engagement with content as the primary driver.