Akamai extends application accelerator

Akamai Technologies on Monday introduced a service for speeding up the performance of Web-based business applications.

Called Web Application Accelerator, the service draws on Akamai's worldwide network of servers to download Web pages to company desktops. Akamai can cache stored, or static, Web content and also create pages on the fly. The service also optimizes the transmission of data over the Internet to company networks to speed performance, according to Tom Leighton, Akamai's chief scientist. Corporate customers do not need to modify applications to use the service, which costs $6,000 per application per month, he said. Akamai grew to prominence in the 1990s with its content-delivery service, which speeds up downloads of so-called static Web pages, which do not change regularly, for public Web sites. With Web Application Accelerator, Akamai is seeking to expand its business by targeting a wider range of Web-based business applications, Leighton said.