Akamai's Services Support Malayala Manorama to Achieve a Prestigious Fourth Position in the World's Most Popular Online Newspapers

Bangalore, Karnataka, India

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leading global service provider for accelerating content and applications online, has announced that Malayala Manorama, a multi-magazine global publishing house, bringing out 44 leading publications in India, is leveraging Akamai's global platform to deliver its online content.

Malayala Manorama publishing house has an impressive list of 44 publications in five different languages, most of them leaders in their respective category, - Malayala Manorama Daily which is the largest circulated regional language daily in India, Malayala Manorama Weekly which is the largest selling weekly in India and The Week which is the fastest growing general interest English magazine in India. These publications deliver content in multiple languages and across categories like sports, music, and television. Since using Akamai, Malayala Manorama has experienced a 70% performance improvement among global audience, and an 80% improvement with its India users. For more than a century, Malayala Manorama has had a stimulating effect on its readers, spurring social progress, defining cultural sensibilities, and even setting political agendas.

The publishing house has an online presence which was supported by its origin server, hosted in the United States. However, when the company decided to do a major revamp of their website by adding more rich media content in the forms of images, video and audio files and adding a completely new television channel - Manoramanews.com, the origin site had challenges in supporting the new increased traffic.

In October 2006, the company chose Akamai's services after evaluating a variety of options. "Our first choice was to do it in house by adding more servers. But that would have resulted in additional hardware, bandwidth, license and manpower costs. We decided upon Akamai as we were impressed by the company's experience, especially in the media industry. Also, Akamai's services increase the scale, reach and performance of our current IT infrastructure, without complexity." said Mariam Mammen Mathew, Chief Operating Officer at Manorama Online "In November 2006, Akamai accelerated the performance of our embedded content and we immediately experienced a 70% improvement in download time. By January, Akamai was delivering our whole site, and since then we have experienced a 100% increase in page views."

Akamai's solution maps each user request to the optimal Akamai edge server, responding in real time to changing Internet conditions and alleviating the impact of network problems to improve media delivery. Akamai also avoids Internet problem spots by applying route and connection optimization technologies, sending media over paths that are fast and reliable, and applying performance-enhancing compression technology and chunked encoding to further reduce transfer times.

"We use several analytic tools including Alexa.com to rank interest in our site. As of today, we are only behind The New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today in the world's most popular newspaper category, according to Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/browse?&CategoryID=206) " says Mariam.

"Our relationship with Malayala Manorama is an extremely satisfying one for all of us. The customer experienced our services in installments, so to speak, and at every stage they were happy with what we were providing for them. Today they trust us implicitly and we in turn believe that our existence is made valuable by our customers' belief in us," says Stuart Spiteri, Director, Asia Pacific, Akamai. "The Indian media is now catering to a global audience in a paper-free environment. As enablers we feel proud to contribute to this transitional phase by extending the reach of Malayala Manorama's information across the globe."

About Malayala Manorama

For more than a century Malayala Manorama has had a stimulating effect on the minds of the Malayali. It spurred social progress, defined cultural sensibilities, and even set political agenda. We have publications in five languages, and from print we have stepped into television and cyberspace. Today, it is a highly successful multi magazine publishing house, bringing out immensely popular periodicals. The company has an impressive bag of about 44 publications, most of them leaders in their respective category which caters to the information and entertainment requirements of a large audience across various segments in India as well as ethnic Indian community groups elsewhere in the world.

About Akamai

Akamai® is the leading global service provider for accelerating content and applications online. Thousands of organizations have formed trusted relationships with Akamai, improving their revenue and reducing costs by maximizing the performance of their online businesses. Leveraging the Akamai EdgePlatform, these organizations gain business advantage today, and have the foundation for the emerging Web solutions of tomorrow. Akamai is "The Trusted Choice for Online Business." For more information, visit www.akamai.com.

Source: Akamai (Business Wire India)

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