Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Afergan, Senior VP & GM of Web Experience Business Unit, Akamai (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: On those two trends, from where you sit at Akamai, how does that affect what you offer and what your customers are looking for from you to support those trends?

Mike Afergan: There are a lot of things that come from those trends, a lot of exciting things. I’d focus on three trends that come out of those devices and cellular connectivity. These three trends would be a concept of situational performance, a concept of complexity, and a concept of new applications.

The first is the notion of situational performance. Even a few years ago, you could talk about performance online as roughly a connected PC that’s stationary running Internet Explorer. And you could talk about the performance of is this website 50% faster, 50% slower? How reliable is it? And you could talk about it in one single term. In today’s world, end users, customers and, therefore, Akamai, need situational performance. By that I mean, for example, what is the performance of this Web experience, website for a user on an iPad with a cellular connectivity in Tokyo? What does it look like for a user with fixed connectivity in Cupertino? What does it look like for a user on an Android phone in France? All of those are different situations, and the performance characteristics of those different situations are going to be varied based on the devices, cellular connectivity and a number of other components. Situational performance is one of, if not the key, trends that our customers are thinking about that has a big effect on things that we’re doing at Akamai.

The second trend is the notion of complexity, which is everything I talked about before: the different browsers, different devices, different sorts of connectivity create a set of challenges for companies. They need to think about how to manage all of these different experiences across the different devices. I have one experience online, but the way that my user interacts with that experience is different, depending on the devices that she has. I may want to offer a different experience if she’s on a cellular connection versus a Wi-Fi connection. I may want to offer a different experience if she’s in my store with a geo-fence versus outside my store versus close to my store versus on the highway going 60 miles an hour. All of those different situations create a lot of complexity and a lot of dimensions that our customers need to think about, which is fundamentally different from where we were a few years ago.

The third key trend is this notion of new applications, which is when you have a portable device that’s powerful, coupled with cellular connectivity, there is a set of things that you want to do and can do that is exciting and wasn’t possible before. Things like mobile wallets and geo-fencing are simple examples of things that don’t make sense to think about when you have a fixed PC in an office but become powerful concepts once you have portable devices with cellular connectivity. There are a lot of things happening, but for our customers, I’m focused on the situational performance, the complexity and new applications.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Afergan, Senior VP & GM of Web Experience Business Unit, Akamai
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