Akamai announced a global increase in the amount of end-user geographies it is serving on behalf of its SaaS clientele. Akamai-accelerated SaaS transactions have grown ten-fold over the past two years, delivering optimized performance and availability of its customers' SaaS offerings to geographically-dispersed users residing in nearly 150 countries.

Presently, one out of every four SaaS transactions delivered over the Akamai platform is executed outside of the United States, emphasizing the need for SaaS providers to develop application delivery strategies for a global user community. When Akamai's Web Application Accelerator(SM) service is deployed to power on-demand business applications, SaaS providers report increased user satisfaction, a competitive advantage over other SaaS providers struggling with application performance issues, and the ability to extend market reach or launch new solutions without global data center build out.

The data on SaaS transactions running across Akamai's globally distributed computing platform - consisting of more than 30,000 servers within nearly 1,000 networks around the world - is based on a diverse range of SaaS applications such as customer relationship management, supply chain and supplier relationship management, human resources and talent management, e-learning and marketing solutions.

Achieving global reach and optimized application performance are mutually dependent success criteria for SaaS providers. Providers find that deploying regional data centers near large user communities is expensive and IT-resource centric and do not provide the agility needed to support rapid global development. To compound matters, building out infrastructure does not guarantee performance. Akamai's Web Application Accelerator service is designed to help customers overcome the problems associated with doing business over the Internet, providing SaaS providers the ability to focus on growing their business, not infrastructure.

"Bullhorn's on-demand, front-office staffing and recruiting software is a rich Internet application that behaves as if it were installed on your desktop," said Art Papas, co-founder and CEO of Bullhorn. "As we began to scale our business internationally, Internet-related performance issues beyond our control became apparent. After considering various options, we chose Akamai's Web Application Accelerator service to help us meet our customers' performance expectations as we scale our business. With Akamai, our customers can quickly and reliably access our application and transact business from anywhere in the world."

Of the 146 countries currently served by the Akamai Web Application Accelerator service, regions common to all Akamai SaaS clientele include the United States , Canada, the United Kingdom, India, Singapore, China, Germany, The Netherlands, France, Japan and South Korea. Akamai also reaches less-trafficked regions with consistent high performance, such as the Republic of Suriname, offering a local-like or geographic boundary-free accelerated solution to all SaaS users.

"With the SaaS market forecast1 to grow by more than double the growth rate for total enterprise software through 2011, SaaS providers find Akamai's Application Performance Solutions ideal for extending the geographic reach of their on-demand applications while avoiding infrastructure build out," said Willie M. Tejada, vice president for Akamai Application Acceleration. "Optimized performance and availability of SaaS applications ensure high levels of user satisfaction — a critical lynchpin for success — that recently deployed customers like Bullhorn and Genius.com®, Incorporated are enjoying."