Bangalore, Karnataka, India
-- Growing presence in Asia Pacific has resulted in Akamai's global platform being utilized by AirAsia Berhad, All Nippon Airways, Cathay Pacific, Emirates, Qantas Airways Limited, and Singapore Airlines, among others.
-- Uptime of online reservation systems, support during peak travel season, and improved communications with remote offices and travel agencies seen as major business benefits of Akamai's services.
Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leading global service provider for accelerating content and business processes online, today announced momentum within the Asia Pacific commercial airline sector for its services.
Estimated to reach US$16 billion in 2006, online travel has become an important channel for the Asian travel and tourism industry, and now accounts for 10 percent of the total travel market in Asia Pacific1. In part, this growth stems from an expanding Internet population, and the advent of multilingual and intermediary travel Web sites.
In response to this growing opportunity, Akamai is working closely with Asia Pacific airlines intent on delivering world-class e-commerce operations and innovative online services including e-ticketing, check-in, and virtual call center support. Today, Akamai is optimizing the Web presence of Asia Pacific commercial airline leaders including AirAsia Berhad, All Nippon Airways, Cathay Pacific, Emirates, Hokkaido International Airlines Co., Ltd., Qantas Airways Limited, Singapore Airlines, and Skynetasia Airways.
"By leveraging Akamai's global, on demand distributed platform, airline and travel-oriented businesses are able to extend their current Web infrastructure so that they can dramatically improve user experience, grow market share, support new markets quickly and cost-effectively, and protect revenue during unpredictable Internet conditions," said Stuart Spiteri, director of Asia Pacific, Akamai. "Having already enabled e-business initiatives for many top commercial airline businesses, Akamai understands the demands on Web site infrastructure, and how to improve key metrics such as conversion ratios and site downtime, without the incremental cost of additional hardware, software or management overhead."
Better site performance and travel agent extranet adoption
Cathay Pacific Airways, an award-winning, international airline based in Hong Kong offers scheduled passenger and cargo services to destinations around the world, and carries almost one million passengers every month. The company's consumer, agent, and cargo Web sites offer a convenient and low-cost way of communicating with over two million customers and partners every month, and provide a critical and secure communications channel with nearly 35,000 travel agents.
"Within a few months of activating Akamai's Web Application Accelerator service, Cathay Pacific Airways achieved a 65 percent increase in global site performance and a 65 percent increase in site traffic without additional infrastructure-an estimated annual savings in infrastructure of $1.5 million, and a significant increase in travel agent extranet adoption," said Scott Ohman, manager, Commercial eBusiness at Cathay Pacific Airways.
Revenue protection and speed-to-market for low-cost carriers
AirAsia Berhad, Asia's largest low-cost carrier, turned to Akamai to optimize their online customers' end-user experience, ensure transaction completion rates, and improve speed-to-market of their Web-based offerings. Akamai provides AirAsia a ready-to-market, e-commerce platform to utilize as new flight routes become available, without having to face the complex and costly issues of application re-deployment. In a recent study2 using third-party testing methodologies, a sample of seven low-cost carriers in Asia shows that Akamai improved AirAsia's site download performance by over 400 percent over the control group. Additionally, AirAsia was the only low-cost carrier with site performance consistently under 10 seconds - at an average of 3.6 seconds.
"During our 1 millionth ticket promotion, our site usage spiked to five times our normal level," said Lau Kin Choy, regional director, IT, AirAsia Berhad. "In the past we would have had to purchase excess infrastructure to be able to handle that type of customer demand. However, by leveraging Akamai's secure content delivery service, our online operations were able to perform flawlessly without the need for additional infrastructure. Akamai's reliable and scalable services have allowed us to increase our market share in each country we've entered online."
Airline booking application acceleration
One major Asian carrier recently implemented Akamai's Web Application Accelerator service to optimize third-party booking and distribution applications hosted in Europe. Akamai demonstrated the ability to outperform the legacy deployment in terms of speed and consistency, which alleviated a major booking bottleneck at the airline's infrastructure. This bottleneck was the cause of continued downtime for the entire Web operation and affected an array of online services.
Site back up and recovery
One of the world's most respected Asia-based airlines turned to Akamai to ensure business continuity of their online operations. Akamai's platform and Site Failover capabilities serve as an automatic back up in case at anytime the airline's site is disrupted. This allows customers and agent partners to continue to submit dynamic flight search data without interruption. All requests are transparently redirected through the Akamai EdgePlatform to the booking engine eliminating any business downtime, and saving millions in potential lost revenue.
Support for seasonal peak traffic
As the leading commercial airline in Japan, All Nippon Airways (ANA) turned to Akamai to enable ANA to maintain timely response to Web page visitors even in peak traffic situations, and eliminate the need for constant system upgrades.
"With Akamai, we believe that we have dealt decisively with our first mile and Web server bottleneck problems," said ANA Information Technology Services Staff Director Tsutomu Aoyagi.
Utilizing Akamai's global network of over 20,000 servers, airline customers have the scalability on demand to support high levels of user traffic. Akamai's integrated reporting tools provide customers with real-time business intelligence to effectively measure the success of their e-business efforts. For more information on how Akamai is helping Asia Pacific airline customers, please visit www.akamai.com/travelreport.
About Akamai
Akamai® is the leading global service provider for accelerating content and business processes 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.
Akamai Statement Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act
The release contains information about future expectations, plans and prospects of Akamai's management that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors including, but not limited to, the effects of any attempts to intentionally disrupt our services or network by hackers or others, failure to have available sufficient transmission capacity, a failure of Akamai's network infrastructure, and other factors that are discussed in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and other documents periodically filed with the SEC.
1. A Strategic Analysis of the Asian Online Travel Market, EFT Research
2. Online Travel Distribution in Asia Pacific: A Study in Effectiveness, September 2006, www.akamai.com/travelreport
Jeff Young, Media Relations, Akamai Technologies, Inc., 617-444-3913 jyoung@akamai.com
Anuradha Muralidharan, Media Relations, Akamai Technologies, Inc., +91 (080) 575 99222 amuralidharan@akamai.com
Source: Akamai (Business Wire India)
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