Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on how networks are going to support growing application and media delivery demands.

1. As Cloud Trends Drive User Expectations Higher, Networks
Must Now Deliver Applications Faster, Safer, Cheaper
Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on how networks are going to support growing
application and media delivery demands.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Akamai
Dana Gardner: Hi. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re
listening to BriefingsDirect.
Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on how the major IT trends
of the day, from mobile to cloud to app stores are changing the expectations
we all have from our networks.
We hear about the post-PC era, but really does anyone talk about the post-
LAN or even the post-WAN era? How are the networks of yesterday going to
support the applications and media delivery requirements of tomorrow?
It’s increasingly clear that more users will be using more devices to access more types of content
and services. They want coordination among those devices for that content. They want it done
securely with privacy and they want their IT departments to support all of their devices for all of
their work applications and data too.
From the IT mangers' perspective, they want to be able to deliver all kinds of applications using
all sorts of models, from smartphones to tablets to zero clients to web streaming to fat-client
downloads and website delivery across multiple public and private networks with control and
with ease.
This is all a very tall order, and networks will need to adjust rapidly or the latency and hassle of
access and performance issues with this would get in the way of users, their new expectations,
and their behaviors, for both work and play.
We're here today with an executive from at Akamai Technologies to delve into the rapidly
evolving trends and subsequently heightened expectations that we're all developing around our
networks and we are going to look at how those networks might actually rise to the task.
Please join me in welcoming our guest. We're here with Neil Cohen, Vice President of Product
Marketing at Akamai Technologies. Welcome to BriefingsDirect, Neil.
Neil Cohen: Hi, Dana. Happy to be here.

2. Gardner: So Neil, given these heightened expectations -- and it’s growing rapidly as we're all in
this always-on hyper connectivity mode -- how are networks going to rise to this? Are they
maybe even at the risk of becoming the weak link in how we progress from this point?
Change is needed
Cohen: Nobody wants the network to be the weak link, but changes definitely need to happen.
Look at what’s going on in the enterprise and the way applications are being
deployed. It’s changing to where they're moving out to the cloud. Applications
that used to reside in your own infrastructure are moving out to other
infrastructure, and in some cases, you don’t have the ability to place any sort
of technology to optimize the WAN out in the cloud.
Mobile device usage is exploding. Things like smartphones and tablets are all
becoming intertwined with the way people want to access their applications.
Obviously, when you start opening up more applications through access to the
internet, you have a new level of security that you have to worry about when
things move outside of your firewall that used to be within it.
Gardner: Neil, one of the things that's interesting to me is that there are so many different
networks involved with an end-to-end lifecycle now. We think about mobile and cloud, and we
don’t have one administrator to go to, one throat to choke, as it were. How do people approach
this problem when there are multiple networks, and how do you know where the weak link is,
when there is a problem?
Cohen: The first step is to understand just what many networks actually mean, because even that
has a lot of different dimensions to it. The fact that things are moving out to public clouds means
that users are getting access, usually over the internet. We all know that the internet is very
different than your private network. Nobody is going to give you a service-level agreement
(SLA) on the internet.
Something like mobile is different, where you have mobile networks that have different
attributes, different levels of over subscription and different bottlenecks that need to be solved.
This really starts driving the need to not only 1) bring control over the internet itself, as well as
the mobile networks.
But also 2) the importance for performance analytics from a real end user perspective. It
becomes important to look at all the different choke points at which latency can occur and to be
able to bring it all into a holistic view, so that you can troubleshoot and understand where your
problems are.
Gardner: This is something we all grapple with. Occasionally, we’ll be using our smartphones
or tablets and performance issues will kick in. I don’t have a clue where that weak link is on that
spectrum of my device back to some data center somewhere. Is there some way that the network

3. adapts? Is there a technology approach to this? We all want to attack it, but just briefly from a
technological perspective, how can this end-to-end solution start to come together?
Cohen: There are a lot of different things that people are looking at to try to solve application
delivery outside of the corporate network.
Something we’ve been doing at Akamai for a long
time is deploying our own optimization protocols
into the internet that give you the control, the SLA,
the types of quality of service that you normally
associate with your private network.
And there are lots of optimization tricks that are being done for mobile devices, where you can
optimize the network. You can optimize the web content and you can actually develop different
formats and different content for mobile devices than for regular desktop devices. All of those
are different ways to try to deal with the performance challenges off the traditional WAN.
Gardner: It's my sense that the IT folks inside enterprises are looking to get out of this business.
There's been a tendency to bake more network services into their infrastructure, but I think as
that edge of the enterprise moves outward, almost to infinity at this point, with so many different
screens per user, that they probably want to outsource this as well. Do you sense if that’s the case
and are the carriers stepping up to the plate and saying, "We’re going to take over more of this
network performance issue?"
Cohen: I think they're looking at it and saying, "Look, I have a problem. My network is
evolving. It's spanning in lots of different ways, whether it's on my private network or out on the
internet or mobile devices," and they need to solve that problem. One way of solving it is to
build hardware and do lots of different do-it-yourself approaches to try to solve that.
Unwieldy approach
I agree with you, Dana. That’s a very unwieldy approach. It requires a lot of dollars and
arguably doesn’t solve the problem very well, which is why companies look for managed
services and ways to outsource those types of problems, when things move off of their WAN.
But at the same time, even though they're outsourcing it, they still want control. It's important for
an IT department to actually see what traffic and what applications are being accessed by the
users, so that they understand the traffic and they can react to it.
Gardner: At the same time I'm seeing a rather impressive adoption pattern around virtualized
desktop activities and there’s a variety of ways of doing this. We’ve seen solutions from folks
like Citrix and Microsoft and we’re seeing streaming, zero-client, thin-client, and virtual-desktop
activities, like infrastructure in the data center, a pure delivery of the full desktop and the
applications as a service.

4. These are all different characterizations I suppose of a problem on the network. That is to say
that there are different network issues, different payloads, and different protocols and technology.
So how does that fit into this? When we look at latency, it's not just latency of one kind of
delivery or technology or model. It's multiple at the same time.
Cohen: You’re correct. There are different unique challenges with the virtual desktop models,
but it also ties into that same hyper-connected theme. In order to really unleash the potential of
virtual desktops, you don’t only want to be able to access it on your corporate network, but you
want to be able to get a local experience by taking that virtual desktop anywhere with you just
like you do with a regular machine. You’re also seeing products being offered out in the market
that allow you to extend virtual desktops onto your mobile tablets.
You have the same kind of issues again. Not only do you have different protocols to optimize for
virtual desktops, but you have to deal with the same challenges of delivering it across that entire
ecosystem of devices, and networks. That’s an area that we’re investing heavily in as it relates to
unlocking the potential of VDIs. People will have universal access, to be able to take their
desktops wherever they want to go.
Gardner: And is there some common thread to what we would think of in the past as
acceleration services for things like websites, streaming, or downloads? Are we talking about an
entirely new kind of infrastructure or is this some sort of a natural progression of what folks like
Akamai have been doing for quite some time?
Cohen: It's a very logical extension of the technology we’ve built for more than a decade. If you
look a decade ago, we had to solve the problem of delivering streaming video, real-time over the
web, which is very sensitive to things like latency, packet loss, and jitter and that’s no different
for virtual desktops. In order to give that local experience for virtual users, you have to solve the
challenges of real-time communication back and forth between the client and the server.
Gardner: And these are fairly substantial issues. It seems to me that if you can solve these
network issues, if you can outsource some of the performance concerns and develop a better set
of security and privacy, I suppose backstops, then you can start to invest more in your data center
consolidation efforts -- one datacenter for a global infrastructure perhaps.
You can start to leverage more outsource services like software as a service (SaaS) or cloud. You
can transform your applications. Instead of being of an older platform or paradigm or model, you
can start to go towards newer ones, perhaps start dabbling in things like HTML5.
If I were an architect in the enterprise, it seems to me that many of my long-term cost-
performance improvement activities of major strategic initiatives are all hinging on solving this
network problem. So do you get that requirement, that request, from the CIO saying, "Listen, I'm
betting my future on this network. What do I need to do? Who do I need to go to to make sure
that that doesn’t become a real problem for me and makes my dollar spent perhaps more risky?"

5. Business transformation
Cohen: What I'm hearing is more of a business transformation example, where the business
comes down and puts pressure on the network to be able to access applications anywhere, to be
able to outsource, to be able to offshore, and to be able to modernize their applications. That’s
really mandating a lot of the changes in the network itself.
The pressure is really coming from the business, which is, "How do I react more quickly to the
changing needs of the business without having IT in a position where they say, 'I can't.'" The
internet is the pervasive platform that allows you to get anywhere. What you need is the quality
of service guarantees that should come with it.
Gardner: I suppose we’re seeing two things here. We’ve got the pressure from the business side,
which is innovate, do better, and be agile. IT is also having to do more with less, which means
they have to in many cases transform and re-engineer and re-architect. So you have a lot of wind
in your sails, right? There are a lot of people saying, I want to find somebody who can come to
this network problem with some sort of a comprehensive solution, that one throat to choke. What
do you tell them?
Cohen: I tell them to come to Akamai. If you can help transform a business and you can do it in
a way that is operationally more efficient at a lower cost, you’ve got the winning combination.
Gardner: And this is also I suppose not just an Akamai play, but is really an ecosystem play,
because we’re talking about working in coordination with cloud providers, with other technology
suppliers and vendors. Tell me a little bit about how the ecosystem works and what it takes to
create an end-to-end solution?
Cohen: In order to solve this problem as it relates to access anywhere and pervasive connectivity
on any device, you definitely need to strike a bunch of partnerships. Given Akamai’s presence
has been in the internet and the ISPs, the types of partnerships that are required are getting your
footprints inside of the corporate network, to be able to traverse over what we call hybrid cloud
networks -- corporate users inside of the private network that need to reach out the public clouds
for example.
It requires partnerships with the cloud providers as well, so that people who are standing up new
applications on infrastructure and platform as service environments have a seamless integrated
experience. It also requires partnerships with other types of networks, like the mobile networks,
as well as the service providers themselves.
Gardner: And looking at this from a traditional internet value proposition, tell us, for those who
might not be that familiar with Akamai, what your legacy and your heritage is, and what some of
the products are that you have now, so that we can start thinking about what we might look
forward to in the future.

6. Cohen: Akamai has been in business for more than 12 years now. We help business innovators
move forward with their Internet business models. A decade ago, that was really consumer
driven. Most people were thinking about things like, "I've got this website. I'm doing some
commerce. People want to watch video." That’s really changed in the last decade. Now, you see
the internet transforming into enterprise use as well.
Akamai continues to offer the consumer-based services as it relates to improving websites and
rich media on the web. But now we have a full suite of services that provide application
acceleration over the internet. We allow you to reach users globally while consolidating your
infrastructure and getting the same kind of benefits you realize with WAN optimization on your
private network, but out over the internet.
Security services
And as those applications move outside of the Firewall, we’ve got a suite of security services
that address the new types of security threats you deal with when you’re out on the web.
Gardner: One of the other things that I hear in the marketplace is the need for data, more
analysis, more understanding what’s really taking place. There's been sort of a black box, maybe
several black boxes, inside of IT for the business leaders. They don’t always understand what’s
going on in the data center, but I'm sure they don’t understand what’s going on in the network.
Is there an opportunity at this juncture, when we start to look for network services bridging
across these networks, looking for value added services at that larger network level outside the
enterprise, that we can actually bring a better view into what’s going on, on these networks, back
to these business leaders and IT leaders? Is there an analysis, a business intelligence benefit from
doing this as well?
Cohen: You’re absolutely right. What’s important is not only that you improve the delivery of an
application, but that you have the appropriate insight in terms of how the application is
performing and how people are using the application so that you can take action and react
accordingly.
Just because something has moved out into the cloud or out on the Internet, it doesn’t mean that
you can’t have the same kind of real-time personalized analytics that you expect on your private
network. That’s an area we’ve invested in, both in our own technology investment, but also with
some partnerships that provide real-time reporting and business intelligence in terms of our
critical websites and applications.
Gardner: Is there something about the type of applications that we should expect a change?
We’ve had some paradigm shifts over the past 20 years. We had mainframe apps, and then client-
server apps, and then we've had N-tier apps and Web apps and services orientation is coming,
where it is more of a services delivery model.

7. But, is the mobile cloud, these mega trends that we’re seeing, are fundamentally redefining
applications. Are we seeing a different type of what we consider application delivery
requirement?
Cohen: A lot of it is very similar, which is the principle of the web. Websites are based on
HTML and with HTML5, the web is getting richer, more immersive, and starting to approach
that as the same kind of experience you get on your desktop.
What I expect to see is more adoption of standard web languages. It means that you need to use
good semantic design principles, as it relates to the way you design your applications. But in
terms of optimizing content and building for mobile devices and mobile specific sites, a lot of
that is going to be using standard web languages that people are familiar with and that are just
evolving and getting better.
Gardner: So maybe a way to rephrase that would be, not that the types of applications are
changing, but is there a need to design and build these applications differently, in such a way that
they are cloud-ready or hybrid-ready or mobile-ready?
Are there any thoughts that you have as someone who is really focused on the network of saying,
"I wish I could to talk to these developers early on, when they’re setting up the requirements, so
that we could build these apps for their ability to take advantage of this more heterogeneous
cloud and/or multiple networks environment?"
Different spin
Cohen: There's slightly a different spin on that one, Dana, which is, can we go back to the
developers and get them to build on a standard set of tools that allow them to deal with the
different types of connected devices out in the market? If you build one code base based on
HTML, for example, could you take that website that you've built and be able to render it
differently in the cloud and allow it to adapt on the fly for something like an iPhone, an Android,
a BlackBerry, a 7-inch tablet, or a 9-inch tablet?
If I were to go back to the developers, I’d ask, "Do you really need to build different websites or
separate apps for all these different form factors, or is there a better way to build one common
source, a code, and then adapt it using different techniques in the network, in the cloud that allow
you to reuse that investment over and over again?"
Gardner: So part of the solution to the many screens problem isn’t more application interface
designs, but perhaps a more common basis for the application and services, and let the network
take care of those issues on a screen to screen basis. Is that closer?
Cohen: That’s exactly right. More and more of the intelligence is actually moving out to the
cloud. We’ve already seen this on the video side. In the past people had to use lots of different
formats and bit rates. Now what they’re doing is taking that stuff and saying, "Give me one high

8. quality source." Then all of the adaptation capabilities that are going to be done in the network,
in the cloud, just simplify that work from the customer.
I expect exactly the same thing to happen in the enterprise, where the enterprise is one common
source of code and a lot of the adaptation capabilities are done, again, that intelligent function
inside of the network.
Gardner: I'm afraid we are about out of time, Neil. I really appreciate getting a better
understanding of what some of the challenges are as we move into this “post-PC” era.
You've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on how the major IT trends of the day
are changing the expectations we all have from our networks, and how those networks might rise
to the occasion in helping us stay on track in terms of where we want things to go.
I want to thank our guest. We’ve been here with Neil Cohen, Vice President of Product
Marketing at Akamai Technologies. Any closing thoughts Neil, on where people might consider
the future networks to be and what they might look like?
Cohen: This is the hot topic. The WAN is becoming everything, but you really need to change
your views as it relates to not just thinking about what happens inside of your corporate network,
but with the movement of cloud, all of the connected devices, all of this quickly becoming the
network.
Gardner: Very good. Thanks again. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor
Solutions. I also want to thank our audience for joining, and welcome them to come back next
time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Akamai
Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on how networks are going to support growing
application and media delivery demands. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All
rights reserved.
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