Akamai Acquires Blaze

Akamai Technologies, Inc. has announced that it has acquired Blaze Software Inc., a provider of frontend optimisation (FEO) technology, in a cash transaction. The acquisition is expected to complement Akamai’s market-leading site acceleration solutions with technology designed to optimise the speed at which a web page is rendered, regardless of end user device.

With the rapid adoption of rich Internet applications and the increase in mobile browsing, new performance bottlenecks are emerging. Websites are becoming richer and more complex, with more compute requirements built into a single page, impacting performance in the browser or client device. As a result, content providers are faced with a growing set of challenges in maintaining a high-performing site and assuring a superior end-user experience.

Blaze provides technology designed to automatically optimise the code on a web page during the delivery process to ensure faster transmission of content and a faster rendering of the page, whether served to a PC, tablet or smartphone. As a cloud-based service that requires no software or code changes by the customer, Blaze’s offering is designed to work with any web site. Akamai plans to integrate the technology into its global cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere.

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“As businesses provide rich, interactive web experiences online and across devices, it is vital that end users receive a consistently high-performing site,” said Rick McConnell, executive vice president of Products and Development, Akamai. “We believe Blaze has developed a powerful solution for frontend optimisation, and that its cloud-based services approach is synergistic with Akamai’s offerings. The team at Blaze will be an important addition to our focus on site acceleration. Our goal continues to be providing customers with the most comprehensive set of technologies to optimise all aspects of their site performance.”

“Core to our focus at Blaze is constant research and product development that enables us to improve the speed of our customers’ sites by automatically applying the latest web performance optimisation best practices,” said Michael Weider, CEO of Blaze. “Our technology is aimed at reducing the number of requests required to load a page, reducing the size of each request, and improving the browser rendering experience for our customers. Combining our technology with the global Akamai platform is a big win for customers who are increasingly looking to take performance optimisation to the next level.”