BANGALORE: Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leading provider of cloud services for delivering, optimizing and securing online content and business applications, today introduced several new capabilities to the company’s Web Performance Solutions. Available now and known as the SaaS Provider Option, these new features and capabilities are designed to allow SaaS providers to use Akamai’s pioneering web application optimization and performance solutions in a manner more closely aligned to how SaaS providers run their businesses.

Akamai’s Web Performance Solutions are already widely in use by SaaS providers around the globe. For example, 18 of the top 20, and 27 of the top 50 SaaS providers trust Akamai to provide enterprise-grade reliability, industry-leading application acceleration and optimization, and the security required to protect SaaS applications from DDoS attacks and data theft.  

With the introduction of the SaaS Provider Option, Akamai is delivering new capabilities intended to address the unique technical and business requirements that SaaS providers face when delivering applications to global users via the Internet. The SaaS Provider Option enables SaaS Providers to more rapidly on-board new customers, reduce operational costs, increase time-to-market, leverage SSL in a scalable manner, and gain deeper customer insights.

Greater business flexibility and efficiency will be critical for SaaS providers given that, according to IDC, by 2018, over $1 of every $5 spent on packaged software, and over $1 of every $4 spent on applications, will be consumed via the cloud; further, about 30% of all new business software purchases will be of service-enabled software, and cloud software will constitute about 20.5% of all software sold and about 19.0% of all applications spending.

One early user of the SaaS Provider Option is Xero. As a global leader in online accounting software Xero provides an intuitive, easy-to-use cloud accounting platform that gives small businesses the real-time financial insights they need to make smart business decisions anywhere, anytime.  Xero is positioned for strong global growth and passed $100M in annualized committed monthly revenue recently.

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