Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Afergan, Senior VP & GM of Web Experience Business Unit, Akamai (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take the situational complexity and performance topics. Could you talk about at what point is each of these problems being solved? Who is solving what part of this diversity? Is it the Web experience owner? What part of the problem is he solving? What part of the problem is an infrastructure vendor like Akamai solving?

Mike Afergan: That’s a big question, and there are lots of different pieces to it. Let me touch on a couple of them. The first point is to put yourself in the content producer’s or the Web experience owner’s shoes. If you’re the CIO or CMO of that company, out of the gate, you’re faced with a daunting challenge: creating a website, building an online presence. That’s hard enough. Thinking through your business strategy reliability, redundancy, scale, and costs, well, all of those challenges have existed for years. CIOs and CMOs didn’t have easy jobs. Heads of e-business, worried about the Web experience, didn’t have easy jobs beforehand. A lot of the things I have talked to you about didn’t even exist as problems two or three years ago, let alone five years ago. If you put yourself in the Web experience owner’s shoes, it is a daunting challenge, not just where we are today but the pace at which he or she has to keep up. Not only does that person have to solve all of today’s problems, but if you and I talk in six months, I’d probably have three or four more things to add to this list to worry about. Those are exciting things from a business perspective for them, but a big challenge at the same time. It is an overwhelming and sometimes daunting challenge for our customers who worry about them.

Some customers prefer to do some pieces of that by themselves. Certainly, from our perspective, owning/writing the content, thinking about those pieces, it is important that it be done by the content owner. Also, I think, they’re making the fundamental architectural decisions. Rewind the clock to a few years ago, there was a lot of simple content transformation technology in the industry. Mobilization is the term we used. Those took the overall sites and tried to overhaul them in a variety of ways. That is the “un-architecture” many companies still use. I think many companies now are looking toward a much more flexible, adaptive architecture. You may be familiar with the concept of design, which is the idea that it is impossible for a Web experience owner to author to all of the different platforms, whether she does it herself or with a partner. Instead, try to build one architecture, one set of Web experiences that when delivered to a phone will automatically adapt to a certain form factor; when delivered to a tablet, will automatically adapt to another form factor; when delivered to a PC, would automatically adapt to a third form factor.

One of the biggest decisions beyond the fundamental business decisions that a content owner has is this architectural decision of how to think about approaching this diverse and complex environment. After that, what we are seeing, given the pace of change and the scale of the complexity, is that the Web experience owners are often looking to services in the cloud, such as Akamai’s, to help enable and simplify this world. Situational performance is a good example of some of the things that Akamai does.

There’s a lot of technology that wasn’t even relevant a few years ago that we’ve built over the past few years.  Seeing the market demand does help to address some of these performance challenges that exist across these different situations. Each situation is a new performance optimization challenge for our technology staff. And our customers value that we can do that in the cloud for them without any changes to their original technology and infrastructure. We’re just one example of a set of technologies that people are using for different sorts of problems that they face.

Relative to situational performance, much of that is being done in the cloud because you can’t solve that problem at the origin. You can’t do anything at the origin that’s going to fundamentally change the performance for that tablet user in Tokyo or cell phone user in London. To have that performance, to have a reliable experience for those users, you must do it out in the edges of the network in the cloud. That’s something, for example, that Akamai does … and similarly with some of the complexity.

One example is reducing the quality of an image for a user on a cellular link compared to a Wi-Fi link. Or understanding what device a user’s coming in from to figure out which form factor to serve him for. Those are things that if the Web experience owner is doing that at the origin, beyond the complexity, beyond the challenge, beyond keeping up, he’s just created a performance problem. All of that information, all of those requests are coming back to the origin where it’s impossible to control the fundamental performance for that user. Typically, the Web experience owner owns the architectural decision, the business and the content creation, and much of the technology to address situational performance. That complexity is being done out in the cloud as close to the end user as possible. That, fundamentally, is where it is most effective and most scalable to do.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Afergan, Senior VP & GM of Web Experience Business Unit, Akamai
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