Akamai Accelerates David's Bridal Online Store, Supports 2x the Traffic

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Akamai Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM), the leader in powering video, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, announced today that David's Bridal, the nation's leading bridal store, has implemented Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator services to accelerate and improve the performance of its online store and help reduce its infrastructure costs and bandwidth requirements by offloading dynamic content to the Akamai platform.

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With the largest selection of bridal gowns, bridal party, special occasion dresses and accessories available online and at its stores, David's Bridal has established itself as the nation's most trusted and leading bridal authority.  Its largely dynamic site averages as many as 600,000 page views per hour and 220,000 unique visitors per day during peak times.  The online store not only gives shoppers the opportunity to shop anytime, anywhere they want, but also allows them to pre-shop on products prior to visiting the stores.

David's Bridal continues to enhance its online store to improve the shopping experience for its customers.  Last year, when David's Bridal went live with new features on its site, the company realized it needed four times more peak capacity than it had anticipated to support its highly dynamic site.  Therefore, David's Bridal turned to Akamai for a solution that could offload its application servers while boosting site performance and delivering a fast, rich and engaging website without fail.  Leveraging Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator and its globally distributed platform, David's Bridal improved its site performance and offloaded its bandwidth and applications stress while extending its infrastructure without build-out costs.

"With Akamai, we spend less money and effort on infrastructure related tasks.  Akamai enables us to re-direct our resources to e-Commerce development activities that improve our online shopping experience and increase our sales," said Jerry Baklycki, Manager of Ecommerce Development, David's Bridal.  "Since leveraging Dynamic Site Accelerator, we've seen significant improvement in site performance.  Now that our site visitors can tap into all the new site features – including enhanced search and a rapidly expanding online assortment – we are confident that the improvement will contribute to higher online sales."

David's Bridal is also relying on Akamai to accelerate all the dynamic aspects of its site.  Shoppers can choose and try on endless combinations of styles, colors and accessories by navigating through its online portal.  "All of our product pages are dynamic and in order to support this level of content, we needed an infrastructure that could scale to support our needs.  The Akamai solutions instantly enable us to accelerate our dynamic content and minimize the demands on our servers." Stan Payson noted, Vice President Interactive Technology and New Business Integration, David's Bridal.

Payson continued, "Since deploying the Akamai solution, it has reduced our peak capacity requirements by 40%, web server peak capacity requirements by 90%, peak CPU utilization by 70% and peak bandwidth requirements by 98% - all while supporting double the peak traffic.  We are very impressed by the results, especially considering the image-heavy and dynamic nature of our site.  No other solution provider could offer the level of support and acceleration services we needed."

David's Bridal can now drive as much traffic as the company likes to its site and be confident that shoppers will have a great online shopping experience.  Not only can the company increase site performance, they can now also absorb unplanned and unanticipated traffic spike without expanding its infrastructure.  "David's Bridal's mission is to provide the bride with the best possible experience, and Akamai provided us a solution that not only improved her online shopping experience but also reduced our infrastructure costs," explained Caryn Furtaw, Chief Information Officer, David's Bridal.

"As retailers like David's Bridal continue to add more dynamic and rich content to their sites, it is crucial for them to be able to cope with the traffic and deliver a fast, reliable site for consumers," said Pedro Santos, Chief Strategist, eCommerce, Akamai Technologies. "Leveraging Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator services and the Akamai globally distributed platform, retailers are enabled to offload their database stress and deliver an enhanced, reliable user experience to their end users with a goal of increasing consumer confidence and loyalty."

About David's Bridal

With more than 50 years of experience dressing women of all ages for life's special occasions, David's Bridal understands the importance of providing brides-to-be with a vast selection of exquisitely crafted bridal gowns and bridal party dresses. Known for outstanding value, fashionable designs and the ease of one-stop shopping, nearly 50% of all brides in the US choose to shop at one of David's over 300 stores located across the US and in Puerto Rico. Working with a knowledgeable bridal consultant, a customer can enjoy trying on a wide selection of gowns and dresses in her size with the added convenience that most styles are available to take home the same day. To learn more about David's Bridal, visit www.davidsbridal.com.

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The Akamai Difference

Akamai® provides market-leading managed services for powering video, dynamic transactions, and enterprise applications online. Having pioneered the content delivery market one decade ago, Akamai's services have been adopted by the world's most recognized brands across diverse industries. The alternative to centralized Web infrastructure, Akamai's global network of tens of thousands of distributed servers provides the scale, reliability, insight and performance for businesses to succeed online. Akamai has transformed the Internet into a more viable place to inform, entertain, advertise, interact, and collaborate. To experience The Akamai Difference, visit www.akamai.com.

The release contains information about future expectations, plans and prospects of Akamai's management that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors including, but not limited to, the effects of any attempts to intentionally disrupt our services or network by hackers or others, unexpected termination of Akamai's relationship with the David's Bridal, failure of markets to develop as Akamai expects, a failure of Akamai's network infrastructure, and other factors that are discussed in Akamai's Annual Report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and other documents periodically filed with the SEC.

SOURCE Akamai Technologies, Inc.

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