UPDATED 09:00 EDT / FEBRUARY 28 2017

CLOUD

Akamai retools its web optimization service for the mobile era

Data from Google Inc. indicates that more than half of mobile browsing sessions are abandoned when content takes longer than three seconds to load. It’s true regardless of whether the fault is with the website or the user’s connection, an issue that companies have no way to address directly.

According to Akamai Technologies Inc., however, it’s possible to work around it. The provider today debuted a new iteration of its flagship Ion website optimization platform that aims to help companies deliver a consistent user experience under different networking conditions. At the core of the release is a technology called Adaptive Acceleration, which can account for connectivity problems when loading content.

Akamai claims that the mechanism analyzes historical visitor data to identify the best time for loading the different assets on a website. This includes not the native content but also advertisements, traffic tracking tools and the other third-party resources that companies rely to handle the more advanced tasks of their online operations. The idea, according to the provider, is to ensure that the order in which content loads on a user’s screen is “optimized for their browsing content.”

It sounds similar to the value proposition offered by Instart Logic Inc.., which raised $45 million in funding last year to drive the adoption of its competing website acceleration service. The platform provides the ability to configure websites so that if a user visits, say, a product catalog, the items and their descriptions will load before the shopping recommendations on the sidebar.

Akamai is pairing Dynamic Acceleration with a number of complementary features that enable Ion to improve the user experience even further. Among others, the service can now configure connections to use the time-tested ChaCha/Poly encryption standard when receiving traffic from older handsets. It performs similar adjustments based on whether a device uses an IPv4 or IPv6 address.

Companies will be able to harness of the new features not only for their websites but also mobile apps thanks to a software development kit that Akamai is rolling out in conjunction. These enhancements could give the provider a much-needed boost in the fiercely competitive content delivery market.

One of the ways Akamai has been trying to up the ante is by expanding into various adjustment segments. Most recently, it launched a remote access service that lets mobile workers securely connect to their companies’ back-end infrastructure without an unwieldy virtual private networking tool. And administrators gain the ability to keep firewall ports closed.

Source: Pixabay

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU