Akamai Solutions Support Massive Traffic Spikes On Ankama Gaming Website

Akamai Technologies, a global leader in powering rich media, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, has announced that Ankama, the developer of the massive multiplayer online role-playing game DOFUS, has chosen Akamai's Electronic Software Delivery and Dynamic Site Accelerator solutions to handle the surge of gamers flocking to its online games and websites and to address the traffic spikes following the release of updates on the DOFUS website.
Owing to the international success of its role-playing game DOFUS now has 10 million members worldwide. The French headquartered Ankama group, with over 300 employees worldwide, recognised its need to improve its download and response times on its online gaming websites in order to provide demanding gamers an excellent user experience.
Ankama's main goal was to manage the dramatic spikes in website traffic that could occur whenever the company pushes out a DOFUS update. To handle these recurring load increases, Ankama sought a reliable partner who could meet this challenge successfully and thus, ensure the online distribution of its updates with the best possible quality and price ratio.
Akamai, a benchmark partner of top gaming publisher, recommended its Electronic Software Delivery solution, which allows all types of software to be delivered with optimum performance, making it easier for users to download online games from the Ankama website.
Jerome Renoux, Major Account Executive of Digital Media at Akamai, said: "After an initial one-month testing phase, Akamai's download solution performed very well and accomplished its main goal - that was to handle massive traffic spikes for Ankama website and sometimes even exceeding 24 Gbps.
"Our content routing capabilities combined with our strong commitment to service quality were also key factors that set us apart from our competitors. The performance was immediately reflected in the sharp rise in the number of game subscriptions recorded on Ankama's DOFUS game website after implementing the Akamai's solutions."
After this conclusive trial period, Akamai subsequently recommended the Dynamic Site Accelerator solution, a unique service that accelerates the speed, scope and performance of websites featuring the richest interactive content.
Akamai currently delivers 10-20% of all internet traffic worldwide and has the largest web content delivery and acceleration platform, with more than 40,000 servers connected to 900 networks in 70 countries.
The Akamai solutions mean that Ankama does not have to deploy its own global download platform or worry about possibly overloading its own platform when releasing new patches, upgrades and demos.
Thomas Bahon, Ankama's Director of Products, said: "We spent several months looking for a service provider to ensure optimal bandwidth quality for both normal everyday web traffic and dramatic load increases. Akamai was the only provider that was able to come up with an effective solution to this twofold issue. Since partnering with Akamai, our technical teams have been able to breathe more easily."
Bahon added: "The solutions deployed by Akamai live up to their promises and provide the quality of service that we want to offer our global gamers on a daily basis so that we can keep expanding internationally and secure our position as leader of France's online gaming market. We needed a partner that could truly support us in achieving our ambitions.
"In addition to increasing the ease of installing download solutions for our users and the fact that Akamai now takes care of all our storage needs, we have observed a marked increase in the number of hits on our websites from online gamers and visitors ever since we set up this platform."
(KMcA)