Electronic Software Delivery
High performance delivery and tools to optimize download of file-based content
Effective content distribution and download strategy is a key factor in maximizing customer satisfaction, download completion rates, and revenue potential.
Software downloads are a chapter within data transfer that demand special consideration. With the Akamai services we can provide, you can ensure that transfers occur with no issues. But, in case those do happen, you can allow your users to recover all their lost download data - and all of this in an environment that keeps your company’s identity intact.
Not only has Akamai helped us save lots of money, but it helps us eliminate planning and constant upgrades to support our 30% annual growth in download traffic. In fact, the incredible growth we’ve experienced in a short time would not have been possible without Akamai
— Dave Burden, Manager of Manufacturing, Cognos, an IBM Company
BENEFITS TO YOUR BUSINESS
- Improve software download completion rates through faster performance.
- Scale globally on demand without costly build-out by leveraging the Akamai Intelligent Platform™.
- Protect your content through token authentication.
- Manage, control, and monitor your download offering with rate limiting, cache optimization, and valuable media reports
- Give consumers a superior software download experience via Download Manager’s fully customizable UI, multi-file software download support, automatic launch actions, and automatic error checking and correction.
- Integrate Download Delivery management into your own systems through {OPEN} APIs
Electronic Software Delivery
The Internet is now the primary distribution channel for mobile apps, video, music, software updates, desktop applications, security patches, and many other file-based digital products.
An effective content distribution and download strategy is a key factor in maximizing customer satisfaction, download completion rates, and revenue potential. Akamai Download Delivery speeds your content to online audiences and lowers distribution costs while giving consumers the download experience they expect – whether they’re on their desktops, smartphones or other connected devices.
The challenges of online content delivery continue to increase: supporting a growing, global customer base, increasingly large files, and periodic demand surges that can be many times the “normal” daily average – especially when content is first made available. The ability to serve these peak demand periods – when customer satisfaction is critical – means that in-house solutions must be over-built, leaving significant excess capacity during non-peak demand periods. It is difficult for in-house developed solutions, with their costs and complexity, to deliver on the promise and revenue opportunity of online delivery. Nor do they address the key challenges of using the Internet as the download delivery platform – latency, congestion, and bottlenecks – which lead to poor download experiences, reduced completion rates, higher support costs, and reduced customer satisfaction. Poor download experiences can drive customers to seek other products, and put your brand equity at risk.
What is Electronic Software Delivery
Download Delivery is a reliable, high performance file-based content delivery solution optimized to deliver large (>100MB) file-based content over the Internet.
It is built on the globally distributed Akamai Intelligent Platform™ for superior capacity, scalability, availability, and performance. Providing clear, comprehensive metrics and optional tools that can monitor and manage the entire download process across your customer base, Download Delivery offers your customers a predictable, high-quality download experience while helping you to confidently address your online distribution goals.
Key Product Differentiators
Reliability, Capacity and Scale.
Akamai is a trusted partner for content providers delivering the world’s largest software releases – global distributions that have established benchmarks for capacity and scale. This capacity and scale is a critical element of an online distribution strategy, because it is impossible to predict when and where your content will go viral.
Quality through Technology, Innovation, and Experience.
Download Delivery is built on over 15 years of Akamai expertise delivering content globally to offer a smooth, high quality download experience for your customers. Since 1998, Akamai’s CDN market success has supported continuous investment in network capacity and software innovations like FastTCP to stay ahead of online audience demand. And because businesses and audiences continue to leverage the Internet in ever-increasing numbers, Akamai’s mission is to develop the technologies and capacity to meet those demands and expectations.
Proximity - Closeness Counts.
Even the highest quality networks are subject to the Internet’s realities of latency, congestion, and packet loss, which can significantly limit download performance. Akamai’s broadly deployed network of edge servers, with 20 to over 100 times more Points of Presence (POPs) than other global CDN providers, minimizes the impact of inevitable network congestion, for consistent download experiences. In addition, we have developed partnerships with the world’s leading service providers, allowing our edge servers to be located deep within over 1,200+ service provider networks – closer to the users, for the lowest latency and highest download speeds. This distributed edge architecture also provides the scalability to meet the largest online demand spikes, and the reliability offered by delivering the content from multiple redundant servers.
Standard and Optional Feature
Download Delivery includes the following standard features
- 100% Availability SLA
- IPv6 support
- Token Authentication to prevent link sharing
- Access Control to manage content access
- Advanced Cache Optimization to improve content cacheability
- Site Failover to provide continued delivery in the event of origin failure
- Log Delivery Services and essential Media Reports for download data within Luna Control Center
- Rate Limiting to control the maximum download bitrate
- Jump Point Navigation/Byte Range Requests to support stream-like playback for downloaded content
- Flexible configuration and management options, via both Akamai’s Luna Control Center Web interface and a rich set of Akamai {OPEN} APIs3
The following features are optionally available
- Content Targeting availability by IP address/Geo association
- HTTPS - Shared Cert/Custom Cert support
- China CDN for improved performance into China
- Download Manager client side desktop software (Windows/OSX) improves software download performance while simplifying the software download workflow and providing detailed analytics reporting
- Client Side Downloads provides client-side download performance improvement using the NetSession Interface SDK
- Identity Services to federate the authentication and authorization process between the user and multiple service and content providers
- NetStorage to provide globally geo-distributed replicated origin that complements Download Delivery’s performance, availability, and scalability supporting reliability and resiliency
