Akamai Unveils Open Platform Initiative

Akamai Technologies, Inc., the provider of cloud services for delivering, optimising and securing online content and business applications, has introduced the Akamai Open Platform Initiative.

Designed to give customers and partners the ability to more easily architect for Akamai services, the set of programs and components that comprise the Open Platform Initiative is intended to create more opportunities for community collaboration and innovation, and provide deeper visibility into and greater control of how enterprises interact with Akamai technology.

With this increased access comes the need for deeper visibility and more streamlined, centralised data control. Through the Open Platform Initiative, Akamai provides the following new capabilities to help users get the most out of their investment in the Akamai Intelligent Platform.

System and development operations integration – For customers and partners that are looking for deeper integration into existing processes and operating environments, Akamai {OPEN} provides access to a rich set of REST style APIs designed to ensure seamless visibility into to, and greater control over their interaction with, the Akamai Intelligent Platform from any environment., Similar access to SDKs and other programmatic assets is expected.

Real-time big data integration – Akamai’s Cloud Monitor provides a real-time data feed that delivers critical transactions and security data from Akamai’s Intelligent Platform to users’ reporting environments for increased visibility and insight into trends and patterns. In addition to offering the capability for custom integrations, users can also leverage out of-the-box integration via Akamai’s strategic relationships with companies such as BMC and Sumo Logic

Single-point user interface – Through the recently introduced Property Manager capability, Akamai’s Luna Control Center provides customers and partners with full access to, and control of how customers use, Akamai products including self-service, troubleshooting and single sign-on workflow management tools.

One core element of the Open Platform Initiative, Akamai {OPEN}, leverages Application Programming Interface (API) expert Apiary to expose the Akamai Intelligent Platform’s APIs to developers, customers and partners. Akamai {OPEN} grants simplified access to Akamai’s platform for better and easier integration with home-grown as well as third party technologies and applications.

The focal point for Akamai {OPEN} is a public web property for developers and technical personnel, which will provide access to education, downloads, documentation and resources related to Akamai {OPEN}. https://developer.akamai.com will serve as the launch point for this web property and the gateway for the Akamai technical community.

“Developer experience is the single most important success factor when it comes to APIs,” said Jakub Nešetřil, Founder and CEO, Apiary. “We built the company to make designing great APIs easy. Partnering with Akamai on Akamai {OPEN} will significantly extend our reach with this community, and more broadly facilitate a larger ecosystem for innovation.”

Enabling the industry and customers to broadly deploy and utilise cloud from anywhere and on any device with optimal performance has been the cornerstone of Akamai’s and BMC’s partnership strategy in developing the Cloud Monitor technology.

“The only way to accurately measure optimal application performance in the cloud is to monitor application performance in real-time through the eyes of the actual end-users,” said Ali Hedayati, vice president, BMC Software. “BMC and Akamai have jointly developed a tightly-integrated solution that enables customers to deploy their applications in the best-in-class cloud environment provided by Akamai, and monitor and manage the performance of those applications in real-time with the industry’s leading real-time, end user monitoring solution.”