Key Impacts
- Delivery of the entire Web content for Siemens A&D customer support portals
- Increased performance by accelerating Web site delivery in China
- Fast and reliable software download
- 100% application availability
- Maintaining international competitiveness
Siemens Automation and Drives (A&D) is one of the Siemens AG's biggest and most successful business units. With approx. 85,000 employees worldwide, Siemens Automation and Drives delivers technology that can be found in the most diverse branches of industry and trade, such as in the chemical, production or process industries, electronic installations, mechanical engineering through to automotive technology. Often Siemens A&D products and services are mission critical, with the operation of entire production facilities depending on them. Customers know that they can rely on Siemens customer support to swiftly come to their aid should a problem arise.
When testing the bandwidth with which customers in Asia had to work with, the Siemens team realized that things had to change fast. Asian users were experiencing a data download rate at a speed of a mere five to six kilobytes per second. The software packages that Siemens provide for download over the Internet, on the other hand, often comprise a several hundred megabytes. "Downloading such quantities of data at this bandwidth goes beyond being a game of patience", says Reusch. Very quickly he and his team decided on Akamai's Dynamic Site Delivery Services to guarantee the availability of their support pages worldwide. According to Reusch, Akamai was the only viable solution for Siemens: "A structure different to Akamai's did not make sense for us. Alternative solutions, such as setting up mirrored servers around the world, would have incurred high costs."
"We still have complete control over our data and we have a solid infrastructure which allows us to continue to grow while expanding our applications and services."
—Jörg Reusch, Project Manager, Siemens A&D
