The Hindu : National : A reward for speeding on this highway!

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Apr 25, 2005

National

National

A reward for speeding on this highway!

Anand Parthasarathy

Speedera, with roots in Bangalore, is among the 10 fastest growing American companies in the Silicon Valley

BANGALORE: On the information superhighway there are no speed limits, and hardly any rules of the road — which is why an Indian start-up just five years old, is already a `Formula One' champ of the worldwide web. There is a clutch of high-profile `sponsors' for each of its `speed trips.'

The United States Space agency NASA, needed an agency last year to consolidate 3,000 of its websites and manage the huge surge in high speed traffic as millions of users worldwide logged on to receive live video pictures from the Rover vehicle after it landed on Mars. The challenge was to provide a 99.999% uptime. The Bangalore and Santa Clara (California, U.S.) based Speedera Networks provided it — making NASA the fastest among government web resources in the United States.

Every time the popular U.S. talent search programme ``American Idol'' (also seen in India on the `Star World' channel) airs, the station sees a massive spike in viewers logging on to cast votes. Fox Broadcasting, entrusted this content delivery work to Speedera.

``Flex Computing''

By October last, Speedera had been judged among the 10 fastest growing private companies in the Silicon Valley for the second year running, in a Pricewaterhouse Cooper survey. Its `agni astra' is a patented technology that it calls ``Flex Computing'' - and most of it was developed in Bangalore, where Speedera has a 50-strong development team. Speedera's on-demand application hosting and delivery technology, fuels the websites of the biggest U.S. supermarket chain, Walmart and the world's largest online bookseller, Amazon.

On a single day - January 11 — this year, the Speedera servers worldwide handled a record 15 billion hits. Since September 2004, Speedera's services in India are being offered by the Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited.

Acquired by Akamai

Last month, while Speedera was proudly announcing the latest customer for its live conference streaming services — the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) - the Indian technology player, was paid the IT industry's ultimate compliment: it was acquired by a fierce competitor.

The company that will absorb Speedera in a deal estimated at $ 130 million is the San Mateo, California-based, Akamai Technologies. Speedera's Bangalore-based employees will soon be joining Akamai's 600 strong workforce - which will seem strange for some of them, because for two years now, the two companies have flung lawsuits at each other.

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