Akamai on Wednesday introduced the Akamai Open Platform Initiative. Designed to give customers and partners the ability to more easily architect for Akamai services, the set of programs and components that comprise the Open Platform Initiative is intended to create more opportunities for community collaboration and innovation, and provide deeper visibility into and greater control of how enterprises interact with Akamai technology.

"Offering our customers and partners the right technology and the freedom to use it in compelling ways are at the foundation of the Akamai Open Platform Initiative," explained Rick McConnell, president, Products and Development at Akamai. "The ability to use the power of the Akamai Intelligent Platform enables developers to take advantage of emerging Internet opportunities and create innovative web experiences optimized for their customers."

With this increased access comes the need for deeper visibility and more streamlined, centralized data control. Through the Open Platform Initiative, Akamai provides the following new capabilities to help users get the most out of their investment in the Akamai Intelligent Platform™.

• System and development operations integration – For customers and partners that are looking for deeper integration into existing processes and operating environments, Akamai {OPEN} provides access to a rich set of REST style APIs designed to ensure seamless visibility into, and greater control over their interaction with, the Akamai Intelligent Platform from any environment. Similar access to SDKs and other programmatic assets is expected.
• Real-time big data integration – Akamai's Cloud Monitor provides a real-time data feed that delivers critical transactions and security data from Akamai's Intelligent Platform to users' reporting environments for increased visibility and insight into trends and patterns. In addition to offering the capability for custom integrations, users can also leverage out‑of-the-box integration via Akamai's strategic relationships with companies such as BMC and Sumo Logic.
• Single-point user interface – Through the recently introduced Property Manager capability, Akamai's Luna Control Center provides customers and partners with full access to, and control of how customers use Akamai products including self-service, troubleshooting and single sign-on workflow management tools.

One core element of the Open Platform Initiative, Akamai {OPEN}, leverages Application Programming Interface (API) expert Apiary to expose the Akamai Intelligent Platform's APIs to developers, customers and partners. Akamai {OPEN} grants simplified access to Akamai's platform for better and easier integration with home-grown as well as third party technologies and applications.

The focal point for Akamai {OPEN} is a public web property for developers and technical personnel, which will provide access to education, downloads, documentation and resources related to Akamai {OPEN}. https://developer.akamai.com will serve as the launch point for this web property and the gateway for the Akamai technical community.

"Developer experience is the single most important success factor when it comes to APIs," said Jakub Nesetril, Founder and CEO, Apiary. "We built the company to make designing great APIs easy. Partnering with Akamai on Akamai {OPEN} will significantly extend our reach with this community, and more broadly facilitate a larger ecosystem for innovation."

Enabling the industry and customers to broadly deploy and utilize cloud from anywhere and on any device with optimal performance has been the cornerstone of Akamai's and BMC's partnership strategy in developing the Cloud Monitor technology.

"The only way to accurately measure optimal application performance in the cloud is to monitor application performance in real-time through the eyes of the actual end-users," said Ali Hedayati, vice president, BMC Software. "BMC and Akamai have jointly developed a tightly-integrated solution that enables customers to deploy their applications in the best-in-class cloud environment provided by Akamai, and monitor and manage the performance of those applications in real-time with the industry's leading real-time, end user monitoring solution."

Fostering a sense of community and helping bolster an ecosystem of like-minded companies focused on driving business innovation through Internet technologies are foundational elements of the Open Platform Initiative. For example, by making it easier to combine its own solutions with services from organizations such as next-generation machine data analytics expert Sumo Logic, Akamai is empowering customers to use data and insight in entirely new ways and giving them new opportunities to create business value.

"Akamai's Open Platform Initiative presents a major opportunity for businesses to exploit the advantages of cloud computing," said Vance Loiselle, CEO of Sumo Logic. "Our machine data analytics platform can now marry rich Akamai logs with enterprise application context to provide real-time insights about customer experience, site performance and security posture."

Building upon Akamai's global reach and Internet visibility, the Open Platform Initiative strategy is designed to provide powerful knowledge and context for partners, customers and developers looking to optimize cloud environments.