| Helen Yang Media Relations 858-404-1436 hyang@akamai.com |
–or– | Natalie Temple Investor Relations 617-444-3635 ntemple@akamai.co |
CAMBRIDGE, MA – September 28, 2010 – Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings), the leading provider of cloud optimization services, today announced that Heels.com, an online retail store that sells designer women’s shoes, has implemented Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator to accelerate and improve performance of its online shoe store and help reduce its database utilization by offloading dynamic content to the Akamai platform. The Akamai solution has helped Heels.com enable a unique shopping experience to its customer base and improve site performance globally. For example, in Australia, site performance has improved by 400 percent since leveraging Akamai. This improvement in site performance has also led to higher search engine optimization (SEO) rankings for both domestic and international customers.
Launched in October 2007, Heels.com sells designer women’s shoes to consumers worldwide exclusively via its online retail store. As part of ensuring the utmost in customer satisfaction, Heels.com prides itself on being the first shoe e-tailer to ship internationally and to offer video for every shoe it sells. Committed to delivering a unique online shopping experience, Heels.com is a media-rich, highly dynamic online retail store. The company’s database and Web servers are continually stressed by serving real-time data to as many as 22,000 unique visitors per day. In fact, back-end bottlenecks previously led to poor site performance. Pages took up to 30 seconds to load and in some cases, customers could not access pages at all. Heels.com needed a solution that could deliver a fast, rich and engaging Web site for its global customer base without fail. Heels.com chose Akamai to address its goals of site performance improvement, a superior online shopping experience and a reduction in database stress, all while extending the company’s infrastructure without extensive build-out costs.
“We evaluated a few content delivery networks and ultimately chose Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator solution to accelerate our online business,” said Eric McCoy, CEO, Heels.com. “Not only did Akamai eliminate the need to deploy additional hardware, it is uniquely able to accelerate dynamic content on our site. Leveraging Akamai, we can improve control over changing content, offload our servers and gain the ability to add more video and rich content without degrading the visitor shopping experience. In fact, since deploying Dynamic Site Accelerator, our site has handled a 78 percent year-over-year increase in traffic – without adding servers.”
Heels.com sends out hundreds of thousands of emails to drive brand awareness and traffic to its Web site. With Akamai in place, Heels.com can be confident that its site will perform optimally for all visitors. Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator is designed to enable pages to display without delay and video to play back instantly, which can contribute to higher SEO rankings.
“Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator helps even the playing field for us in a highly-competitive business. Plus, Akamai offers us the same level of service as it offers the biggest brand names. We see Akamai as more than a solution provider – we see it as a technology guru and committed partner. We are both pushing the envelope to deliver a better shopping experience for customers all around.” McCoy added.
Heels.com also leverages Akamai to support its successful video chat customer services. Heels.com was the first retailer to offer live customer service chat over video and it needed a dynamic SSL certificate that would follow the chat session all the way through to the checkout process. Leveraging Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator services, Heels.com can ensure its video chat sessions are completely secured. “As e-tailers like Heels.com continue to add more dynamic and rich content to their sites, it is crucial for them to be able to cope with the increased traffic and deliver a fast, reliable site for consumers,” said Pedro Santos, Chief Strategist, eCommerce, Akamai Technologies.
About Heels.com
Founded in October 2007, Heels.com is the premier women’s online shoe shopping Web Site where you can find the newest, most stylish high heels around. At Heels.com, we pride ourselves in offering only the best customer service so that customers get an optimal internet shopping experience. Heels.com is a privately held company and is headquartered in Charlotte, NC.
About Akamai
Akamai® provides market-leading, cloud-based services for optimizing Web and mobile content and applications, online HD video, and secure eCommerce. Combining highly distributed, energy-efficient computing with intelligent software, Akamai’s global platform is transforming the cloud into a more viable place to inform, entertain, advertise, transact and collaborate. To learn how the world’s leading enterprises are optimizing their business in the cloud, please visit www.akamai.com and follow @Akamai on Twitter.
Akamai Statement Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act
This 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, unexpected early termination of Akamai’s relationship with the CyberSource, failure of the Edge Tokenization service to operate as expect, changes in regulations and laws governing the transmission of payment information, a failure of Akamai’s network infrastructure, and other factors that are discussed in Akamai’s Annual Report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and other documents periodically filed with the SEC.
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