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Note: Akamai will install Riverbed's Steelhead appliances into its points of presence, while Riverbed will integrate Akamai's routing and caching smarts into its enterprise data center appliances.
Riverbed and Akamai plan to team up to fully integrate the Akamai network with Riverbed WAN optimization products. In a partnership announced Tuesday at Interop 2011 in Las Vegas, a UBM TechWeb event, Akamai will install Riverbed's Steelhead appliances into its points of presence (POPs) so that enterprise customers will be able to apply Riverbed WAN optimization to any cloud service--even one from a service provider that isn't a Riverbed or Akamai customer.
"We want to make the Internet look and behave like your private network," said Neil Cohen, senior director of product marketing at Akamai, in an interview. "So we're aiming to extend the footprint of the Akamai network into the enterprise data center." To that end, Riverbed also will integrate Akamai's routing and caching smarts into enterprise Steelhead data center appliances by the end of 2011. Riverbed hasn't said how this will be achieved, but the most likely option is by using the VMware environment already included in Riverbed appliances. This means that it will likely require the hardware version of Steelhead on the enterprise...