Akamai and Ericsson Team-Up in the Cloud

Akamai and Ericsson announced a team-up at the 2011 Mobile World Congress this week, to create a mobile cloud acceleration platform extending Akamai’s reach even further. The exclusive deal between the two is aimed to set-up content delivery networks “touching” operator networks on a global scale in order to introduce better service, new business models and a premium price tag.

“Ericsson is tapping into Akamai Technologies’ expansive content delivery networks (CDNs) to create a mobile cloud acceleration platform that will push e-commerce, enterprise and Internet content to the edge of the wireless network and thus closer to the end user.”

Akamai President David Kenny announced day one of the Mobile World Congress that his company lacks the influence in mobile networks it once had. Ericsson CEO and President Hans Vestberg also noted that Ericsson is slowly shifting into another direction in the cloud, partially away from cloud-based billing and large scale dedicated hosting. Instead, the company is making strides in clouds’ development; the same kind involving its team-up with Akamai.

Akamai had seen more than just one team-up this week.  Social game platform WeeWorld is now utilizing Akamai’s Rich Media Accelerator to improve load times by up to 30 percent. U.S users had only seen 8-15 percent faster loading times, but European users averaged at around 3 times that number.

Zooming out a bit, MWC 2011 has been teaming with mobile, and cloud, activity. Motorola had some big news today, including the upcoming arrival of Xoom to Europe, an acquisition and a brand new business phone. Nokia and Microsoft officially announced their team-up in the event and Samsung introduced its new Honeycomb-running Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet. The LG Optimus Pad wasn’t late to come either with a smaller screen and a few bonuses.

Juniper Networks is  not left behind of course, and the company today announced the integration of Juniper Networks vGW Virtual Gateway with the Juniper Networks SRX Series Services Gateways  as a part of its hybrid cloud data center security strategy. The networking giant also  hit a new 52-week high in the stock exchange, reaching $43.70 a share.