Ad firm sold on Akamai as net accelerator

NEW YORK - Saatchi & Saatchi is using Akamai Technologies' content delivery network to take its advertising business up a notch, but not in the way network executives might suspect.

There is no Web site being accelerated. The advertising firm is using Akamai as an extension of its internal network, making it easier to share ideas and collaborate on projects even when team members are oceans apart. The approach is a departure from the way companies have typically used Akamai's thousands of edge servers that sit atop hundreds of networks around the world.

"We are all about ideas . . . and we have two needs: to share those ideas internally between account teams and to share them externally with our clients," says Laura Limbach, CIO at Saatchi & Saatchi. "And we needed to do that in a very secure, fast way."

Various content included

The advertising firm is using Akamai to speed the delivery of streaming video, PDF files, Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and other forms of content that are the building blocks of advertising campaigns for customers such as Toyota, Johnson & Johnson and General Mills.

In the past, Akamai customers primarily accelerated Web site delivery, but now businesses are increasingly turning to Akamai to move "business critical" information, an Akamai spokeswoman says.

Saatchi & Saatchi, of New York, employs about 7,000 workers in 138 offices in 82 countries. Geographic disparity created a challenge to collaborative efforts, Limbach says, so the company set up an internal content-management system called Brain to put all of its creative resources in one secure place. Then came the need to quickly deliver the vast amounts of digital information to employees and clients.

The company considered building its own infrastructure to support the growing amount of digital information it wanted to move, but quickly nixed the idea because of staffing constraints and cost, Limbach says.

Convinced about security

While some corporations might be reluctant to throw their intellectual property onto CDNs, which run over public networks, Limbach says security wasn't an issue. "We believe Akamai's highly secure network meets the highest level of physical, network, software and procedural security," she says.

Limbach wouldn't go into detail about specific security measures in place, but says Saatchi & Saatchi has internal security protocols, including firewalls and application security, that help ensure the integrity of information as it moves from the company's internal systems to the Akamai network.

Saatchi & Saatchi started down the CDN path in the late 1990s when it decided that its traditional method of using couriers to ship videos between offices and clients was starting to be a drag on business.

"It was an expense in terms of making copies. And it was a time factor in terms of going through couriers and customs, then delivering the tape and having to go to a video room, pop it in a VCR and take a look at it," Limbach says. "The difference between that [method] and for everybody around the globe to be able to look at a video at their desktop within minutes after it's created is quite amazing. It's a true change of business practices."

Saatchi & Saatchi began using streaming media firm Intervu in 1998 and moved to the Akamai service when Akamai acquired Intervu in the spring of 2000. About five months ago, Saatchi & Saatchi began using Akamai to deliver all of its content, not just streaming media, when it switched to the CDN's EdgeSuite service, which delivers not only static content and streaming media, but also dynamic content from the network's edge.

Delivery times slashed

Projects within Saatchi & Saatchi often undergo numerous revisions. With EdgeSuite, changes are inserted into existing pages within Akamai's edge servers and there is no need to return to origin servers every time a tweak is made, shortening delivery time dramatically, Limbach says.

"A video that would average a 40-second delivery is now being delivered in 6 seconds [with EdgeSuite]," she says.

Limbach says moving to the EdgeSuite service involved changing host and server names and redirecting requests to the EdgeSuite service. "The actual changes that we needed to make were minor and painless," she says. "Very painless, actually."

The only drawback is the cost of EdgeSuite, Limbach says. It's more expensive than the streaming media service Saatchi & Saatchi was using. The EdgeSuite service starts at about $15,000 per month. However, she says that justifying the additional expense wasn't difficult.

"If we have hundreds of users who are now able to access the content they need faster than they did the day before yesterday, it would be difficult to put a price on that," Limbach says. "It means you're generating ideas and going to market faster than you were the day before yesterday. And that's all in support of our clients."