Akamai Enables Synteract to Cost-Effectively Deliver a Citrix Virtualized Application for Global Clinical Trials

California-based Synteract is a privately held, full-service contract research organization (CRO), dedicated to meeting the clinical research, technology, and safety needs of biotechnology, medical device, and pharmaceutical companies. With a successful track record of more than 14 years of clinical trial development and management, Synteract has earned a reputation as a responsive company that understands the unique challenges inherent in performing clinical trials. One of those - SynCapture - is proprietary electronic data capture (EDC) software that enables clinical studies to be performed using three modes of data entry, including paper, fax and the Web.

Synteract knew it needed to address performance bottlenecks outside of the data center to enable an effective, end-to-end virtualization solution. "Virtualized applications are highly sensitive to roundtrip latency, packet loss and TCP overhead. We were contending with the inherent inefficiencies of the Internet. We spoke to an ISP that offered a managed solution but application access was limited to users on a private network. It would not have been possible to deploy private network connections to all of our customer sites. Akamai's IP Application Accelerator solution is really the only one capable of resolving these issues for Internet users, and it's affordable," explains Dodds. Before the Akamai solution was in place, Synteract's call center was experiencing a high volume of performance-related complaints. Once the IP Application Accelerator solution was implemented, performance improved dramatically and, as a result, customer complaints plummeted.

"With Akamai in place, we feel confident in our ability to deliver Citrix XenApp on a global scale and ensure a level of performance that meets the needs of any clinical trial study"
—Glenn Dodds, Senior Director of Information Technology, Synteract