When it comes to the progression of cloud computing, speed is a major factor in these days of immediacy.  Akamai’s well aware of culture’s growing demand in this arena, providing cloud optimization services that focus on speed and efficiency.  They’ve teamed up with Riverbed, provider of WAN optimization, for a breakthrough product, with an aim to accelerate hybrid cloud services and adoption.  Th be joint effort delivers a tool to overcome application performance bottlenecks that currently plague the enterprise, bringing a new solution to the public cloud.

The two companies will be developing a joint application acceleration solution specific to hybrid cloud networks, leveraging a combination of Internet optimization and WAN optimization.  With more and more applications moving to the cloud, managing the intangible is of increasing importance to businesses.  Akamai is already a widespread product, with an extended reach across global networks, reportedly some 90k servers.  Where Riverbed comes in is in the utilization of its offering, able to quickly spread to existing Akamai clients.  Combined, Akamai’s able to enhance its current offerings, presenting another perk to its users.

“Enterprises are increasingly deploying a mix of both in-house and cloud-based applications,” said Joe Skorupa, research vice president, data center transformation at Gartner.  “As this shift to hybrid networks occurs, ensuring application performance and end-user productivity is critical, creating a need to integrate access to corporate applications, as well as SaaS, in a single pervasive framework.”

It’s an important goal that a handful of cloud companies are devoting resources towards, seeking the best path for introducing the public cloud to the enterprise.  Facing a compounding series of issues from legacy cloud solutions, many businesses are looking for new perspectives on  the cloud, namely looking to the public cloud in order to develop a hybrid solution that fits their needs.  The promise of circumventing costly infrastructure build-outs increases a businesses effectiveness internally and throughout its client-facing services.

Akamai and Riverbed will need to focus on their technology integration moving forward, particularly as they set out to address new and rising application performance challenges that come with hybrid cloud networks.  In many ways, Akamai and Riverbed are developing services around cloud services, which is a growing trend in many respects, taking the form of consulting, virtual services and other guises.

The public cloud sector has been gaining a good deal of attention lately, even attracting participation from Citrix and TechAmerica, participating in government standards and addressing the ideals set forth by the current Obama Administration.  With any public cloud solution, agility is key, and that’s an area Akamai and Riverbed excel in.  Marrying the private and public cloud is a holy grail for service providers, and this team-up is another step towards a seamless union.