I hope you enjoyed as much as me the Q & A with Andrew Grant presented in the June issue of Asian e-Marketing, where he elaborated on how Akamai Technologies is transforming the cloud into a more viable place to inform, entertain, advertise, transact and collaborate.

Akamai’s enthusiastic spokesperson had so much to share that I am proud to present at this point the second half of his very informative and exclusive interview that focuses this time more on data analytics, which nicely ties in with our issue's main theme.

Andrew Grant (AG) leads the development and execution of Akamai Technologies marketing efforts in the areas of Film and Interactive Entertainment and is giving in the second part of our interview on insights into data and analytics.

Q: Everybody is holding a little piece of data and I ask myself, who will bring it all together and analyse it to create deep insights?

AG: “Akamai has launched a media analytics platform that provides both a server side and client side solution that is fully integrated with Akamai's HD Network. We all know that gaining insights into the performance of live streaming and on-demand digital media offerings is critical for content publishers to tackle challenges like e.g. monitoring and allocating costs, or optimizing marketing efforts. As implementing video analytics solutions have been costly in the past or required substantial technical investment, many companies operated without the intelligence although they knew that it is really important to manage a digital media business properly and meet audience demands. Akamai's comprehensive video analytics SaaS solution bridges the gap in existing analytics and reporting services by providing deep and contextual business and technical video measurements in audience behavior, content usage, and quality of service. We further believe that because we are able to search many devices, we are able to aggregate, defragment, and re-aggregate data for our clients.

Andrew Grant

Q: Not to mention that consumers are getting more and more demanding. How is Akamai dealing with that?

AG: TV Everywhere in North America is here a good example, as it raises the question if it is just a cable guy delivering video to a mobile device or if it is providing an opportunity to see how behavior with content changes from device to device? We work with TV Everywhere as well as Nielsen in the US, as they are experts in delivering rich data about advertising in the television domain. We use them to get deeper insights into our clients and meet their expectations. As consumers shift to consuming on many devices, there are suddenly a whole bunch of fragmented data sets around that need to be analysed to make intelligent business decisions. Our Media Analytics solution allows us to put that all into place. Therefore our clients can focus on their job and we take care of the rest, always aware that Moore’s Law hasn’t expired quite yet!

Q: That prompts another good question: How do you try to keep up with the time and the demand of our days?

AG: I think that a lot of the work we are doing in the mobile arena is probably the idea of the terrestrial home connected wired broadband connection as opposed to a wireless cloud being ubiquitous and always on. We have made significant investments and we will continue to make investments in serving that mobile environment. It involves partnerships with the telco companies, innovation in terms of software that we deploy across the network, as well as around 2,000 of the world’s best engineers working exclusively on this problem in a global way. That is what gives me confidence that when we set off on that path to go from a hundred million to a billion in revenue and now to go from a billion to five billion in revenue in a much shorter period of time that we will be able to get there because we have those great engineers, we have them working in tandem with all of these dynamic business relationships to support that next generation of mobile experience. We have 90,000 servers distributed world-wide and can move the edge of the network to up to 2.1 billion mobile devices or connected devices world-wide. The mesh gets finer based on the ability to put software into different places and working closely with our partners. We are working down this path already, executing on the strategy, working closely with connected device manufacturers to be able to: first, optimize their ability to receive video streams off the network and deliver those to consumers in the best way and then be able to support the delivery using the device as part of the network as pitching not just receiving. Suddenly, the possibility for media and that personalized experience is just immense.”

Taking into consideration the prediction of media analysts that internet video alone will account for 62% of all consumer internet traffic in 2015, as content publishers continue to leverage online media as a premium distribution channel for advertising inventory and consumers continue to demand more content online, I can definitely confirm that we will hear more from Akamai in the future.

I can promise to present an exclusive interview with Martin Haering, Vice President of International Marketing at Akamai Technologies, in the August issue of Asian e-Marketing. Feel free to join us again then!

By Daniela La Marca