CDNetworks

Square Enix, a leading gaming company in Japan, was facing challenges in providing a stable network infrastructure for online gaming. The company was using several CDN vendors concurrently to ensure service continuity. However, using multiple CDN vendors was costly, and the company was looking for ways to reduce these costs. They formed an interdepartmental professional team with the goal of reducing CDN costs. Every year, the Square Enix CDN team compares current vendors and other vendors including those outside Japan. To provide gamers with the best environment that uses cutting-edge and high-quality service, vendors are compared and replaced annually.

Infernum Productions AG, an international online games publisher and developer, faced a challenge with their fantasy MMORPG “Dragon’s Prophet”. The game required users to download and install an approximately 10 GB data packet prior to playing. Even with relatively fast data connections, download times often reached up to 4 hours. This long waiting period tested the patience of many users, often resulting in the interruption of the download and negative comments in the Gamer forums. The transfer speed and conversion rate (the ratio between downloads and actual game registrations) required significant optimisation to expand the gaming community, especially in the key geographical regions of Germany, France, Great Britain and Poland.

In April 2012, Innisfree entered the Chinese market to capitalise on the growth potential by winning over prospective buyers. Before opening its first store in Shanghai and while planning for the launch of their Chinese website, Innisfree examined how it could best provide a seamless online shopping experience for customers. The objective of the Chinese website was to deliver the same customer experience as the Korean website. To achieve this, the brand had the following requirements: First, fast loading was essential because a slow loading time could result in a rapid increase in the bounce rate for visitors. Second, the brand needed a system environment capable of flexibly responding to high user traffic, for example, during a promotion on the website. The third requirement was for full technical support and website maintenance to be provided. It was essential that full technical support be made readily available for any request once the service was adopted.

Saxo Bank, a leading international investment bank, was facing a challenge with its online trading and investment platform, SaxoTrader, in China. The demand from investors and institutions within China to access the SaxoTrader platform grew significantly, and so did the need for accelerating the performance of the application in China. The latency caused by the distance between the Denmark-based datacentre and China, along with China’s vast geography and complex Internet peering, resulted in slower performance. Fast transaction times are critical to stock, bond, and foreign exchange trading. As little as one second can result in lost revenue from incomplete or incorrect trades based on out-of-date market information. Saxo Bank also wanted to ensure the same customer experience in China that the SaxoTrader platform is known for around the world. Saxo Bank quickly realised that doing business in China needed a different approach.

edict egaming, a provider of online gaming platforms, was facing significant bandwidth usage costs due to the billing system of local Internet providers on the Isle of Man, which is based on actual data volumes rather than flat rates. This meant that every megabyte transmitted was billed to the customer. With its growing number of users, edict egaming was incurring an average five-figure amount per month in bandwidth costs alone. Additionally, data transmission capacity was stretched to the limit at times, particularly during peak hours. The company sought to significantly reduce monthly data volume and therefore make considerable savings.

iOffer, an online marketplace, was facing challenges in delivering dynamic applications and content to international locations due to inherent packet loss and latency of the internet. This resulted in slow download times and page load times in excess of three seconds, especially for international users who accounted for more than fifty percent of the site’s visitors each month. The company wanted to improve the delivery of dynamic applications and content to international locations and stand behind its sub-one second performance goal without affecting the bottom line or forcing iOffer to raise its prices. The company considered building an additional data center closer to international site visitors to enhance dynamic website performance, but it was deemed prohibitively expensive.

IPM Group, a Belgian media company, faced challenges with their high-traffic websites. The company's websites needed to be visually appealing, easy to navigate, fast, and reliable. They also had to handle unexpected traffic spikes, such as after significant news events. The company's existing IT infrastructure was designed for static, text-based content, which resulted in slow page load times and occasional unavailability. The company needed a solution that could improve page load times and manage traffic spikes without incurring prohibitive costs.

JCB, a pioneer in the credit card business in Japan, was facing challenges with internet latency and low availability that impacted their web content delivery to China. The sudden termination of their China web server infrastructure by the local ISP was a painful learning experience for them. They considered a policy change swiftly. There was a risk that a similar situation would occur if they worked with another similar ISP in China. As such, they decided to set up their web server in Japan to serve the China market while still having the web speed and stability of content delivery as a key area of consideration.

MYmovies.it, the second most visited video entertainment website in Italy, was looking to become a major Internet reference portal. This required the use of state-of-the-art technology to deliver a high volume of relevant content in a technologically advanced manner. The company was constantly experimenting with and implementing new solutions, tools, and products to improve and expand its premium quality services. However, the company faced the challenge of improving website performance without increasing investments in bandwidth or making changes to its existing infrastructure. MYmovies.it was looking for a single provider of caching and streaming services that could rapidly implement a higher-performance and easier-to-use solution than it had been used to. It also sought a partner that was passionately focused on the end user experience.

Tourism Victoria, the Victorian Government’s lead tourism agency, was looking to expand its reach into strategic growth markets, particularly China and the millions of Chinese speakers around the world. They planned a two-phase, multi-million dollar online and off-line promotional campaign in China. However, they recognized that site performance and availability issues could arise within mainland China due to the country's variable Internet infrastructure and network peering. Additionally, the cost to host visitmelbourne.com in multiple datacentres in each target market would have been prohibitively expensive. Moreover, Australia’s geographic isolation from the rest of the world can add 100-200 milliseconds of latency between origin servers in Australia and international visitors.

As TuneUp Software GmbH expanded its customer base, latency became an issue for customers located outside of Europe. The company's business model, which is based on selling over the web, required optimising the user experience and speeding up download times. The physical distance between the server and the customer location was found to have a significant impact on performance. The company's web servers were under a lot of strain, with sub-optimal speeds and high latency levels. The company also noticed an increasing bounce rate, with users leaving the site after visiting a single page. This was particularly concerning as the company was expanding into international markets.

Jabra, a global provider of audio headsets, was facing challenges with its growing international presence and sales opportunities. The company needed to ensure that its website was always accessible in all parts of the world, no matter how remote from its native Denmark. Key target markets for growth included Hong Kong, Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, and China. Jabra needed its website to load very quickly in these regions to maintain its reputation with potential customers and prevent site abandonment. The company was using a content delivery network to achieve better load times and “time to interaction”, but found that it did not have the international reach it needed, billing was unpredictable, and its support was lacking. There were also particular challenges when targeting China due to strict content filtering, often resulting in high latencies.

As Hostelworld’s global footprint rapidly grew in terms of its customers and properties, especially in the Asia Pacific region, it found that the performance of its website outside of Western Europe was becoming increasingly important. It soon became clear that users outside of Western Europe were often experiencing a lag effect when viewing the content online. With Hostelworld’s main website being hosted in its primary data centres in Dublin and London, customers situated further afield didn’t experience the same level of site performance. In order to deliver the best possible experience for its global customers, Hostelworld needed to ensure that its website performed equally as fast across the various continents and devices.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) is a global leader in the protection of human rights, with 400 employees operating from offices on 5 continents. The HRW website is critical to the organization's success, as it allows them to disseminate information about human rights abuses worldwide. However, the website is occasionally targeted by individuals, governments, and organizations that aim to obstruct HRW's efforts. These attackers often employ denial of service (DoS) or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. While HRW had the ability to manually mitigate these attacks, the process was time-consuming and disruptive, requiring the immediate attention of HRW's two-person technical web team and preventing the organization's 70 content creators and publishers from performing their critical web-related tasks. Furthermore, the HRW website could not process online donations during an attack, as it consumed all server resources.

Agent Provocateur, a premium British lingerie retailer, was facing a challenge with its global online footprint. As the company expanded, site latency became an issue, particularly for customers outside the UK, including those in the US, China, and Australia. Localized webpages were taking too long to load, a problem that was exacerbated during peak shopping times and sales. The company realized that to attract new customers and grow in its key target markets, it needed to ensure that it wasn’t compromising on its website performance. Deploying multiple locally hosted sites would be too complicated and require significant resources, leading the company to decide that a content delivery network partner would provide the best solution.

AREP, a subsidiary of France’s national railway operator SNCF, is an engineering firm involved in all aspects of modern urban architecture. It was founded in 1997 by two architects and engineers, Jean-Marie Duthilleul and Etienne Tricaud, to design urban spaces for not only large metropolitan areas, but also individual districts, neighbourhoods, and streets. The company is known for its skills in designing multimodal railway stations offering a wide array of mobility services for busy travellers. Building these types of structures in dense urban areas requires overcoming major technical challenges while respecting the constraints of what are often heritage sites. Today AREP leverages that know-how to develop effective solutions for other types of urban spaces. With 700 employees from over 30 different countries, AREP’s experts include architects, urban planners, designers, engineers, economists, programmers, project managers, and more. Its engineering and construction projects range from multimodal hubs, railway stations, and other public areas to offices, hotels, housing, shopping centres, and technical facilities.

King Jouet, a major toy retailer, operates an e-commerce website that experiences a significant surge in traffic during the holiday season. The number of page views increases by a factor of eight in November-December, with sales during the first ten days of December equivalent to the entire month of January. The company needed a solution to manage these seasonal traffic spikes without investing in additional servers. Previously, King Jouet had used another content delivery network, but it was costly.

Wistia, a video marketing platform provider, faced challenges in delivering high-quality video content to its rapidly growing customer base worldwide, especially in the Asia Pacific region. The company's strategy of leveraging different service providers' strengths for redundant systems and operations was hindered by the high cost of data center hosting and uneven content delivery network performance in the Asia Pacific region. Wistia needed a solution that could provide robust and cost-efficient platform delivery to a global audience, with a particular focus on improving service quality in the Asia Pacific region.

Yatedo, a French start-up formed in 2009, is a search engine that specializes in people searches and online reputation. With more than 5 million unique visitors per month and traffic coming mainly from the United States, Yatedo was experiencing recurrent slowdowns of information synchronization and display, which had a negative impact on user experience. This is because Yatedo’s server is currently based in France, at a great distance from potential internet users located, for example, on the West Coast of the United States.

CanalChat Grandialogue, a leading provider of online chat services for special events, faced the challenge of delivering continuously-updated content to all participants of a given chat. The content is usually disseminated from the customer’s premises, which leads to two challenges: one, mitigating the effects to the customer’s internal bandwidth when its on-site employees connect to the discussion; and two, keeping the chat running smoothly when employees at other sites throughout the world connect. The company needed a solution that could handle all these requirements. They were looking for a provider flexible enough to offer a system that could be adapted to their customers’ various specifications.

Imperia Online, a real-time strategy game, requires quick responses from its players and instant feedback for them to build their empire and direct their armies. Without a fast response time from the server, a game like Imperia can quickly become unplayable, as players are unable to quickly respond to threats from their neighbours or launch their own attacks at the right time. There are markets where browser-based free-to-play games are especially popular – such as Russia and Brazil – where poor performance was becoming a real issue, making it challenging for users to enjoy the real-time gaming experience. Russia and Brazil’s internet infrastructure means that games that demand high performance do not always work as intended. For Imperia Online, which wants its customers to be highly invested and spend a lot of time with the game, poor performance is untenable – but its previous CDN provider was not able to guarantee performance in these areas.

SpotOption, a leading provider of trading software, was facing latency issues with its platform in China due to the country's poor network infrastructure and the Great Firewall of China. Despite engaging a content delivery network (CDN) provider to speed up the service in all markets, performance issues remained in China. As exchange rates change so quickly, online traders expect the platform to be fast, reliable and responsive or they will abandon the service. SpotOption’s service was especially at risk because traders use binary option platforms in expiry times as short as 15 seconds. It was essential that prices were displayed in real-time to avoid the risk of arbitrage, where traders take advantage of price differences between platforms, which can cause losses that are damaging to the business. SpotOption needed a CDN provider that could accelerate content both inside and outside of China.

Knight Frank, a global real estate agency, was facing challenges with its website performance. Clients in some parts of the world, notably Australia and the UAE, were experiencing slower loading times when accessing their respective websites. This was undermining Knight Frank's brand, which is built upon delivering the highest quality standards. The company also faced issues with its website in Asia, particularly in China, where it was unable to deliver a fast and reliable service to users. This was making it difficult for Knight Frank to penetrate the Chinese market. The company identified that the physical distance that data had to travel was the cause of latency. In addition to this, Knight Frank was also faced with the risk of being hacked and the challenge of mitigating DDoS attacks.

The customer is a Chinese Internet finance and insurance company that uses Oracle's cloud service for its ERP business. However, there are no OracleCloud service nodes in China at present, which means users in Mainland China may encounter some problems when trying to access the OracleCloud servers that are located overseas. This includes slow access speeds, which can negatively impact the company's business operations.

Online gaming companies are faced with the challenge of maintaining a consistently exceptional user experience to keep global gamers engaged. Any less than perfect performance can lead to frustration among gamers and drive them to other platforms. Issues such as poor network connections, lag times, jitter, and downtime can negatively impact the gaming experience, especially when the games are getting faster, richer, and more interactive. High utilization of server resources, high IT costs, and the need to safeguard against cyber security threats place a heavy strain on gaming providers. These factors make it increasingly difficult for online gaming companies to acquire and retain customers, offer new products and features that customers will pay for, and sustain revenue growth. Gaming is among the most demanding applications due to its sheer volume of data, transactions, and number of simultaneous users.

Bally, a Swiss luxury leather goods brand, was among the first high-end brands to realize the potential of the increasingly affluent Chinese market. Since launching the first shop in Hong Kong in 1978 and Beijing in 1986, Bally has expanded its presence in the country to 60, with 51 boutiques in mainland China and 9 in Hong Kong. To further capitalize on the business opportunities in the country, Bally introduced a dedicated Chinese website, www.bally.cn, in 2011. The website, featuring high-resolution images and videos of Bally’s high-end shoes, handbags, and accessories, brings the company’s trademark products to the fingertips of China’s growing population of high-income earners. Despite the opportunities offered by the Chinese market, e-commerce in the country poses a few challenges too. Due to the 'Great Firewall' implemented by the Chinese government, companies such as Bally need to be aware of its restrictions and localize their content, not only regarding language but also photography and site layout. Chinese geography can also prove problematic. Despite a high level of Internet penetration in the biggest cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, there are areas where telecommunications infrastructure is in need of an upgrade to meet the demands of the growing digital economy. China’s Internet infrastructure has limited peering points and fragmented network topology, which can result in patchy connectivity and slow page download speeds for web users.

HighQ, a leading provider of secure document exchange and social collaboration software, faced a challenge when its customers, including a major international law firm, began to roll out HighQ’s collaboration platform to their overseas offices. Users outside of Europe were experiencing high latency when accessing the application, leading to a slowdown in web page loading and document transfer speeds, especially during peak business hours. HighQ considered hosting in multiple local data centres to achieve optimal performance for users in the US and Australia. However, the time and resource required to establish similar data centre infrastructure overseas made this strategy unrealistic.

The Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy, the Republic of Indonesia, has been running its origin servers in Indonesia and the United States. However, when overseas users, the main target of the website, tried to access the website, web page loading speeds were too slow. There were two urgent challenges that the Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy, the Republic of Indonesia, wished to resolve and improve. First, page loading speeds. It required faster page loading speeds in order to allow users to search for the information they want. Second, the Ministry wanted more efficient operation and management of its IT infrastructure to respond to an increase in access from overseas users scattered all over the world.

Historic Futures (HF) offers a unique Internet-based traceability service known as String, which is used by hundreds of businesses, including Gap, Levi’s, Tesco, and Wal-Mart. However, poor Internet performance in critical supply-base countries and regions, such as Bangladesh, China, India, and Southeast Asia, made the String application load at painfully slow speeds. This led suppliers in some areas to complain that the performance of String made the application unusable. As a result, HF’s customers struggled to collect data needed for traceability purposes. HF needed to improve global performance of its application or risk losing customers. HF’s IT team considered how it could serve the application locally in problematic regions. It evaluated some of the largest global hosting providers but found that each one lacked data centre presence in one or more core regions of the world. HF also concluded that building out its own global data centres would put too much strain on its limited IT resources and budget.

Bally Interactive, a division of Bally Technologies, began serving online casinos with downloadable games but faced major cost and user experience challenges. Serving both dynamic and static content from a single data center location in Gibraltar, bandwidth pricing and performance challenges increased as player counts grew. With players originating from Europe, nearly every game-play request came from an international location. The company had to overcome performance and pricing issues immediately. Gibraltar’s extremely expensive bandwidth and the inconsistent application and download performance from the local data center meant they had to act fast or lose their fast-growing audience. Complicating matters further, many of Bally Interactive’s gamers request downloads from local Internet connections, which vary greatly in performance throughout Europe.

NHN Corporation operates two of the web’s most popular properties in Korea: Naver and Hangame. The two sites together average 950 million page views and 17 million visitors per day. However, NHN’s analysis of website visitor behavior showed that many of its China-based visitors were prematurely abandoning the Naver and Hangame sites. This puzzled NHN management, because NHN was serving the same high-quality content to China’s market as it did to the rest of the world. After more thorough analysis, NHN’s IT team noticed that slow page-load times within China were causing visitors there to spend less time and view fewer pages on the site. NHN’s Director of the CDN Management Team, Sewon Jang, summarized the problem this way: “The quality of content itself is important, but without fast page downloads, site visitors won’t stick around long enough to see all of our great content.” \n\nWith the 2008 Beijing Olympics right around the corner, NHN wanted to act fast to rectify its website performance issues. This would enable NHN to maintain a firm grasp on its web portal leadership position among China’s Korean-language audience. The company knew that there would be an enormous upswing in Korean-language search engine traffic, and it did not want search engine competitors to steal away market share in China with better site performance. According to Jang, “We needed to be faster than any other Korean portals to be the predominant player in China.”

Oxybul, a leading online toy retailer in France, initially had two different content delivery networks (CDNs): one for static content and one for dynamic content. However, the company decided to streamline its system and sought a single solution that could handle all types of content. The challenge was to find a solution that could cut Oxybul’s CDN costs, improve its website response time throughout France, and simplify its IT infrastructure by reducing the number of direct connections on the servers. Additionally, the solution needed to be able to absorb peaks in traffic, particularly during the busy Christmas holiday season.

Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW) has a mission to provide independent information to countries with an information deficit. With this at the forefront of every business decision, Radio Netherlands Worldwide aims to ensure that people have access to information, news and background via shortwave transmission through its 3000 worldwide media partners, such as FM radio stations, regional and local websites and its own Internet website, wherever they are in the world. Over the past couple of years, the number of hours aired by short wave has decreased substantially and this trend will continue in 2012 and beyond. The broadcasters’ distribution mix is therefore shifting towards Internet distribution and in line with its core mission; it was looking to implement a reliable, fast, powerful and high-performing Internet news service to reach these challenging markets and emerging countries. One of their core aims is to provide independent information to countries with an information deficit. However, their existing Internet solution just did not have the speed or capacity to reach their principal target audiences – Asia, South America and Africa.

Transhotel, a global travel services provider, was facing challenges with its expanding client base and the increasing reliance on the internet for conducting business. The company needed a reliable and responsive technology platform that would allow close collaboration between the company and its clients. The company was also looking to expand into new markets, including Asia, Russia, Latin America, and India. The challenge was to ensure that the business could maintain and build on its growth without being hampered by speed or latency problems. The company's main website, www.transhotel.com, has a daily turnover of over 50,000 operations, most of which are room availability enquiries. 90% of these operations are served on the end-user’s computer in less than 5 seconds. The company needed a solution that would ensure speedy and uninterrupted access to the applications and websites, thus improving the end user’s experience.

As Shopify’s customer base of online merchants grew across the globe, the company recognised the need to ensure the best website user experience possible for shoppers in a multitude of different countries. This led Shopify to underpin its website content delivery capabilities with the service of a content delivery network (CDN). Unfortunately, the CDN service provider lacked a cloud delivery presence in Australia, a fast-growing market for Shopify. To accommodate the needs of Australia-based merchants and their end users located in Australia and New Zealand, Shopify searched for a way to ensure optimal website performance in both countries - without incurring massive infrastructure build-out costs; the cost to expand data centre capabilities in the region was prohibitively expensive. At the same time, website traffic was growing for Shopify in the US and Europe. To continue its differentiated capability of delivering high-performing websites, Shopify network engineers sought an affordable solution that could ensure fast website delivery anywhere in the world.

Spiceworks, a company that provides a free desktop IT management application combined with an online community for IT professionals, was facing a challenge with its international users. The company's website was hosted from a single data center location in Austin, Texas, which was cost-effective for serving the domestic audience. However, Spiceworks began to notice that international users were spending less time than domestic users in the community. The company realized that Internet latency was affecting their business and that they needed to deliver community site content from locations that are closer to their international users. In Australia, for example, the Spiceworks community site would frequently deliver outdated content due to unusual and unpredictable content caching mechanisms used by Australia’s largest network provider, Telstra.

Calaméo, a free document publishing and sharing platform developed by WebCentric, faced a challenge due to its immense popularity and rapidly-growing data volumes. The platform, which allows users to incorporate multimedia features into their web publications, needed additional IT infrastructure to manage the skyrocketing bandwidth capacity required to store and display a huge number of Word documents, PDF documents, and other content. The platform is based in Paris but has an international user base, necessitating technology that could quickly deliver content to users across the globe. Calaméo’s managers sought a solution that would provide additional capacity and rapid, reliable service at a reasonable cost.

Wacker Chemie AG, a global chemicals business, was experiencing severe performance problems with its website in countries such as China. The website pages were taking 2-3 minutes to load due to the distance the data had to travel from Germany. This was causing the company to lose leads as customers opted to purchase from competitors due to the long load times. The company tried to resolve the issue by placing cache servers in Hong Kong and implementing changes to the delivery of the website, which reduced load times to 30 seconds per page. However, this was still considered too slow and the company was reluctant to manage a separate infrastructure abroad due to its complexity.

Leader Summaries, a company providing business summary library books for professionals, was facing a significant challenge with its website performance. The company's website, leadersummaries.com, was experiencing a surge in popularity across South America. However, many subscribers were visiting the website from telecom networks that delivered unreliable performance. As subscriber volumes grew, so did the time it took to deliver content from the Leader Summaries datacenter in Spain to users in South America. This resulted in latency-induced delays driving page-load times up to 20 seconds in areas of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru. The poor website performance led to a rise in customer complaints and cancelled subscriptions, placing the company's entire business model at risk.

The French Tennis Federation (FFT) needed a system that could handle sharp spikes in website traffic during the first few days that tickets go on sale. This international aspect is vital since the French Open attracts numerous visitors from Russia, China, and the US. Therefore it decided to host its static content on CDNetworks’ servers, to be sure that pages would load quickly for users anywhere in the world. The FFT chose CDNetworks because of its solid reputation for effective, reliable service.

Libération, a major French daily newspaper, was facing issues with its website, particularly slow page loads on mobile devices. This was due to the use of responsive design technology, which required the full page for computers to be uploaded first and then adjusted to the size of the smartphone screen. This not only made viewing the website on mobile devices tedious, especially in areas without 3G network coverage, but also impacted Libération’s SEO as page load times are a factor in search engine rankings. The digital technology team at Libération decided to switch from responsive design to dynamic serving, a technology that allows companies to have two websites with the same URL address: one for use on computers and one for use on mobile devices.

MailUp, a technology company operating in Italy, developed a digital cloud computing platform used by SMEs and large corporations to create, send and monitor newsletters, e-mails, and SMS. As part of their development plan, they aimed to grow in non-English speaking markets. However, they faced challenges in the initial phase of their push into Indonesia and Japan, where competitors were hard to surpass and offered a more user-friendly experience. They needed to improve performance for customers accessing the platform, balance the traffic load, and offer superior performance over rival infrastructures in these markets to facilitate and drive forward market penetration.

Linkstorm, an online advertising company, moved their web serving infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2014. While AWS provided a strong global presence, Linkstorm's brand customers demanded the fastest experiences possible to optimize consumer click-through rates. Therefore, Linkstorm had always accelerated their AWS implementation with content acceleration services from CDNetworks. However, the growing fraud landscape in online advertising forced advertisers to require more security options than AWS could efficiently deliver. Brands and advertising teams wanted high-speed SSL verification of ads to ensure their target consumers were receiving legitimate ads and ad content, instead of fraudulent ads that were causing problems for brands and consumers alike. Incorporating SSL into content delivery would ensure that ads and ad content came from trusted and secure sources.

Monin, a French family business founded in 1912, makes premium syrups for bars and restaurants. It is also one of the world’s leading producers of fruit purées, liqueurs, and sauces. The company does all its production in-house, with operations in France, the US, and Malaysia. Three years ago, Monin decided to switch from its proprietary ERP software to a professional web-based application that could better support the company’s growth strategy. It selected Oracle’s JD Edwards fully web-based software, initially installing it in France and later rolling it out to Malaysia. The company performed user tests and other analyses on the software, which quickly revealed major performance problems. Response times in Malaysia were over 350 ms—compared with just 10–15 ms in France where the application was hosted. Those long response times made the ERP completely unusable by Malaysian staff. Moreover, the ERP is a business-critical application for Monin. It manages all of the company’s core business processes: production, quality control, sales, purchasing, accounting, and other corporate functions. Without a well-running ERP, the company would not be able to operate smoothly or efficiently. Even the slightest glitch could throw the business off track—with serious and potentially costly consequences.

In 2006, The Onion's rapid growth in subscribers and site visits began to strain its infrastructure, leading to significant and unpredictable downtime. This downtime drastically reduced The Onion’s ability to sell ad inventory, negatively impacting both business planning and revenue. The Onion initially leveraged the services of two content delivery networks (CDNs). However, the primary CDN caused a site outage and its help desk staff lacked the highly qualified engineers needed to quickly bring The Onion’s site back online. This could have severely damaged The Onion’s brand just as it was gaining popularity. The primary CDN also took up to two days to provision new services and site features.

easyMarkets, an online trading service provider, identified China as a key market for its business. However, the company faced challenges in delivering its dynamic content in China due to slow and unreliable website performance. The speed of the trading platform was a critical factor for easyMarkets and its customers, as real-time price updates were essential to avoid the risk of arbitrage. The company had previously enlisted the help of another content delivery network provider for its platform performance in other markets, but this provider could not offer the same service in China. Therefore, easyMarkets needed a CDN partner that could provide global support, including China.

SEMI, a global industry association serving the manufacturing supply chain for the micro- and nano-electronics industries, faced multiple challenges with its website infrastructure. The organization had to reduce its IT staff by 75% due to a reduced IT budget, stretching the remaining staff to support multiple proprietary systems and manage their delivery via their twenty-six multilingual websites. SEMI’s IT leaders had to find a way to simplify their IT infrastructure and deliver a quality user experience around the world. Another challenge was improving the reliability and performance of its China website as China grew in global economic significance to the industries that SEMI serves. The cost of hosting replicated versions of its websites in Hong Kong was prohibitively expensive and it still would have left SEMI’s content residing outside China’s “Great Firewall.”

Delamaison.fr had been using a CDN since 2009, to cope with the peaks in traffic associated with Christmas, sale periods and one-off promotions. Although happy with the display speed of its pages thanks to the CDN, the time taken to update pages was causing problems; with so many product references, the site sometimes needs to update tens of thousands of pages per hour, which is a very difficult task for a CDN provider to manage using an infrastructure based on a large number of servers. The period of time known as the cache invalidation (the time it takes to tell the CDN server storing the page in a cache that it needs to connect to the Delamaison.fr source server because there has been an update) was often taking longer than an hour - a situation that was a concern for visitors to the site and hard to understand internally for the staff modifying product information. The IT department then needed to introduce unnecessary workarounds to satisfy staff frustrated by the delays.

Rail Europe 4A operates websites that allow people living outside Europe and North America to book train tickets for any European destination, regardless of the different rail companies that may be involved. Their customers are located in countries around the world and span multiple time zones, currencies, and languages. As their business expanded, they realized they needed to revamp their website architecture to keep up. They wanted to provide the same high-quality service across the board—even to customers living 15,000 km from their servers. The challenge was to enhance their existing infrastructure with the help of a content delivery network provider, which would optimize the supply of content to their websites.

Ariston Thermo’s solutions for thermic comfort management comprise of Wi-Fi connected boilers and water heaters that can send information such as temperatures to its IoT platform in Europe. Customers can then access this information using the mobile or web app. Ariston Thermo found that its website and mobile app users in China were experiencing very slow load times - a critical flaw for its remote heating management system, which is designed to work in real-time. If the connected app is slow, the user experience suffers, putting the success of the product at risk. China has its own unique issues, which poses specific challenges for companies launching websites and applications into the region. This can impact web performance in the country and makes it hard or even impossible to access a website hosted outside of China – which was putting the success of Ariston Thermo’s connected app at risk. Ariston Thermo needed a solution fast, but building a second IoT platform in China was not feasible, both in terms of costs and timing.

AWOK.com, one of UAE’s leading ecommerce websites, was facing challenges due to its rapid growth. The company was investing significant resources to ensure the website was accessible and loading in an acceptable time. However, these resources were needed elsewhere to manage the growth of the business – managing logistics to guarantee fast delivery, attracting new customers to the site, adding new products to the site, and all of the other activity that goes with a thriving ecommerce business. AWOK.com found that after just 270ms, its potential customers might leave the website and look elsewhere. A slow website means lost sales – a risk an ecommerce website cannot afford to take. Additionally, AWOK.com’s success meant it was a bigger target for criminals looking to disrupt its business by overloading or hacking the website. In order to maintain its position as an ecommerce leader, it was vital for AWOK.com to keep its customers’ trust and keep its website secure.

Peach Aviation, a Low Cost Carrier (LCC) based in Japan, heavily relies on its website as a primary source of revenue, with more than 90% of bookings made online. As such, maintaining website performance and strengthening security are critical. The company faced challenges in managing high traffic during promotional periods and ensuring fast website display to avoid user strain. With the expansion of services to other Asian countries, the risks of unauthorized access and DDoS attacks increased, necessitating stronger security measures. Peach also needed to ensure a high level of service for its predominantly young, smartphone-using customer base, who would quickly abandon a slow or unresponsive website.

The customer is a renowned provider of credit checking services in China, serving banking and Internet-finance clients with personal credit loans, enterprise credit loans, and risk control business. They obtain original credit data by accessing the API provided by data providers, which they then process and analyze to finalize credit checking reports for their clients. However, they were facing challenges with slow API request responses and data loss during the initial credit data checking. These issues were significantly affecting the system business of the enterprise as there are specific time limits on the response time of credit checking.

The customer, a large educational institution with 16 subsidiaries and non-profit organizations, was facing challenges with their Salesforce CRM solution. The main issue was that the origin of Salesforce was located in non-mainland-China areas, which led to a poor user experience. The domain name or IP addresses of Salesforce were constantly changing, leading to unstable access to the platform. Additionally, Salesforce had to support both mobile and PC versions to cater to staff who worked out of the office.

The customer, headquartered in Munich, Germany, with seven branch offices in China, faced challenges in their daily office operations. The different branches needed to cooperate with each other via video conferencing. However, when using Skype for multi-party audio and video conferencing or sharing presentations, they encountered issues such as slow login, network dropping, and video stutter. This was because the Skype origin server was not located in China, causing latency and performance issues.