Want to speed up the performance of your enterprise applications? Akamai has made several enhancements including faster performance and more detailed reporting to its Web Application Accelerator service.

Akamai on April 30 announced the first major enhancements to its Web Application Accelerator service since it was introduced in 2005. The enhancements are available immediately at no extra cost.

More than 125 companies including Audi and Cathay Pacific Airways use the Web Application Accelerator service to speed up delivery of internal Web applications.

"We really see a broad mixture of applications, from ERP to on-demand applications, extranet portals, product life cycle management and supply chain management," says Neil Cohen, senior manager of product marketing for Akamai.

Cohen says the typical performance increases for the Web Application Accelerator service – without the latest enhancements – are five-fold improvements across continents and two-fold improvements within continents.

"That’s going to get even better with the latest enhancements," Cohen says.

These enhancements include:

* New service-level agreements that promise 100% availability.
* Easier and faster integration with Oracle, SAP and IBM Websphere.
* New reporting tools that show the real-time performance improvements of Akamai’s routing.
* More Akamai servers in international areas near end users, which translates into performance improvements of between 40% and 60%.
* Performance improvements known as pre-fetching, which brings embedded dynamic content closer to end users before they need it.

The enhancements are not a result of Akamai’s March acquisition of Netli, a rival in the area of Web application acceleration services. Akamai said additional enhancements to Web Application Accelerator from the Netli acquisition will be made in the future.

Akamai’s Web Application Accelerator service starts at $10,000 per month/per application.

Akamai says its approach offers much better performance than alternatives, which include using caching appliances in data centers.

"It’s not only about making applications faster but about making applications available to end users," Cohen says. "If your application is five-nines [of availability] in the data center but users can’t get it, then it’s unavailable to them."