Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM), a leading provider of cloud services for delivering, optimising and securing online content and business applications, announced today that Bond International Software, the global provider of recruitment and human capital management (HCM) software and services, has deployed Akamai Terra Enterprise Solutions and as such achieved an average 30% improvement of global round-trip transaction times for its SaaS applications.
Bond International Software has been a global provider of Recruitment, HR and Payroll software & services for nearly 40 years, has clients in more than 40 countries, and estimates that 100,000 users access its software solutions on any given day. It was one of the first companies to introduce a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model in the HCM field to better serve the globally distributed nature of its clients’ businesses.
Daniel Richardson, Group Chief Technology Officer at Bond International Software comments, “The increasing worldwide popularity of our SaaS solution was the driving factor behind our requirement to rethink how we optimise application performance, especially for those customers with employees in remote locations or in countries with less developed communications infrastructure. Changing our data centre configuration was going to be costly, and an appliance based-approach was ruled out, so we started to look at other options such as Web acceleration technologies provided by the Akamai Intelligent Platform.”
Since a large number of global clients rely on Bond’s SaaS-delivered HCM solutions on a daily basis, a smooth transition was essential. It took just two weeks to begin a trial of the optimized solution, which required no software or hardware changes at Bond or at customer locations around the globe. Once performance was analysed and further enhancements made to the way traffic was routed, the solution was then rolled out in phases.
Richardson added, “Not only have we seen a performance increase, concurrency of logged-in users is up too, suggesting that customers are using the application on a regular basis, and for longer, due to the speed and reliability which it offers them. We have also found that the new Akamai accelerated solution is helping to close deals when demonstrated to clients, by impressing with its efficiency and responsiveness, compared to competitor solutions.”
Terra Enterprise Solutions takes advantage of the scale and reach of the Akamai Intelligent Platform to deliver SaaS and other cloud-based applications globally with speed, security, and resilience. Applications leveraging a centralized delivery model can suffer from inconsistent performance, especially for users located far from the host data center. Unreliable performance can frustrate users and lead to application abandonment. Infrastructure build-outs require additional CAPEX and rarely solve the problem, pushing ROI even further out of reach. Terra Enterprise Solutions deliver the response times, security, and availability that drive application adoption and productivity – and require no hardware, software or code changes.
“Enterprises understand the value of SaaS, but still worry that inconsistent performance may negate much of the operational benefits. Furthermore, when cloud applications perform badly they are abandoned by users, who try to find ‘more productive’ ways to do their jobs,” concludes Alex Gibbons, Vice President for Northern Europe, Akamai. “By turning to Akamai, Bond International Software is making sure that its customers can trust the performance of its cloud-based applications wherever they are in the world.”
