Nov. 4, 2009 (Business Wire) -- Akamai Japan K.K., a subsidiary of Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leader in powering video, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, today announced that its Dynamic Site Solution has been adopted by Rakuten Ichiba, one of the largest Internet shopping portals operated by Rakuten Inc. in Japan, to accelerate the performance of its eCommerce site. Rakuten Ichiba is also leveraging Akamai to help extend its infrastructure by offloading a large amount of its web content to the Akamai globally-distributed network.

Rakuten is one of the leading online shopping portals in Japan, having a membership of around 30,000 retail stores online. Besides the eCommerce portal, the company is also operating several online businesses, including Rakuten Travel, a well-known travel arrangements service, Rakuten Books, an online bookstore, Rakuten KC, a credit card and financing service, and e-BANK, an online banking service. Rakuten Ichiba operates under a system in which each retail store creates their own setup on Rakuten’s web site, and each retail store maintains and constructs their own unique homepage in order to sell their products. These homepages use a large number of images to display and showcase their products, and there is also an emerging demand for adding rich, video content to these homepages to engage shoppers and better demonstrate their product features. With each retail store using a wide variety of images and video content to create an attractive shopping site, an enormous amount of web content was stored on the Rakuten Ichiba servers.

As a result, Rakuten needed a solution that could meet its growing server needs. It has become a pressing issue for Rakuten to find a low cost and convenient method for offering highly scalable and reliable customer services without having to make enormous investments in space and time to expand its own infrastructure. Leveraging Akamai, Rakuten provides improved server capacity for storing web content and improved reliability and security of client web sites while lowering the cost of system operations. Rakuten can also accelerate distribution of their content globally online without having to deploy new hardware.

Mr. Osamu Kurokouchi, Group Manager of Network Development and Operation, Rakuten, commented, “As online shopping continues to grow and gain popularity in Japan, our customers are looking for ways to improve their use of images and rich media content such as videos on their sites that help engage shoppers and better describe their products’ features. We need to renew and augment our servers several times a year in response to such increasing customer needs.