IBM And Akamai In Partnership For Web Hosting

IBM and Akamai Technologies Inc. revealed a partnershipThursday that will expand Akamai's customer base and enhance IBM's Web-hosting services. IBM Global Services will resell Akamai's FreeFlow caching service for delivering Internet content and applications. IBM will also integrate FreeFlow into its Web-hosting platform as an additional service.

Akamai says the agreement is significant not only because it gives the company a high-profile customer in IBM, but also because of the wide reach of IBM's Global Services and Web- hosting service. "Akamai services will be available to a new set of customers in the business-to-business market," says Jeff Young, Akamai marketing manager. Doug Elix, senior VP of IBM Global Services, said in a statement: "In addition to our Web-hosting services, Akamai technology will allow us to deliver to customers entirely new levels of speed and reliability, which are increasingly seen as two the critical success factors of any E-business."

In a separate announcement, Akamai said it will purchase and deploy IBM Netfinity enterprise-class servers running the Linux operating system. Although Akamai has identified IBM as its primary server supplier during the next year, the deal is not exclusive to IBM, and Akamai will continue to work with other vendors.