Innovating at the Pace of Mobile

Transcription

1 White Paper Innovating at the Pace of Mobile Understanding and overcoming the unique challenges of the online mobile space

2 Table of Contents executive summary...3 Introduction...4 The Challenges of Mobile...4 Mobile Networks 4 Mobile Devices 6 Continuous Change 7 Akamai Aqua Ion Mobile: Simplifying and Optimizing Mobile 8 How Aqua Ion Mobile Works 8 Optimized Performance 9 Intelligent Performance 10 Partnering with a Platform 11 Why Akamai...13

3 Innovating at the Pace of Mobile 3 Executive Summary: In today s on-the-go world, mobile adoption is occurring at an unprecedented pace, creating a tremendous opportunity no company can afford to ignore. Our mobile devices are our constant companions, transforming the way we shop, eat, play, and live. They have become such an integral part of our lives that 44% of people would choose their devi ces over their wallets if they could only take one with them when leaving the house in the morning, and one-third of us report feeling anxious when away from our phones for even a short period of time, according to the 2012 Time Mobility Poll. i Even more remarkably, online mobile usage is already catching up to the desktop while promising far greater potential, given the medium s unique access to anytime, anywhere interactions that are highly personal and highly relevant, as well as its singular ability to fulfill needs that are both immediate and impulsive. The opportunity that mobile presents for businesses is game-changing. Unfortunately, the challenges are equally formidable. Organizations are struggling to deliver mobile experiences that live up to user expectations, confounded by mobile last mile, slow networks, unreliable connections, and device limitations all contributing to end user interactions that that simply don t measure up when compared to the desktop Internet. To capture the mobile opportunity, marketers must deliver consistently high quality experiences. This requires the ability to overcome the limitations of wireless networks and delivery systems, as well as a strategy for handling the extensive and ever-growing diversity of end user devices each with its own capabilities and limitations. Success will be driven by an intelligent understanding of the real-time context of each request, including device characteristics and network conditions, to provide a tailored and optimized response. Finally, due to the unprecedented pace of innovation in the mobile space, organizations will need the ability to move with speed and agility. This places a premium on solutions that reduce complexity and seamlessly support a wide variety of mobile strategies. In this paper, we examine in detail the challenges that organizations need to surmount to successfully capitalize on the mobile opportunity, and we look at how a comprehensive mobile delivery platform can help maximize the chances of success. Built on Akamai s intelligent, globally distributed network, AQUA Ion Mobile provides such a platform, reducing IT cost and complexity while making it easy for businesses to offer engaging, responsive mobile experiences web or native across every device and every network, every time.

4 Innovating at the Pace of Mobile 4 Introduction The mobile revolution has come fast and furious, transforming the way we shop, play, work, and interact. From paying for coffee, to getting restaurant recommendations, to sharing their lives, people are using the device in their pocket or purse to do more and more each day. The pace of mobile s growth is astounding: Cisco reports that global mobile data traffic in 2011 was eight times the size of the entire Internet in 2000, and it is expected to increase another 18-fold by ii Similarly, Google reports that search queries from mobile devices have quintupled in the last two years alone; in fact, during the 2012 Super Bowl and Olympics, respectively, 41% and 47% of U.S. search queries came from mobile devices.iii To give it another perspective, mobile device usage is reported to be growing at a rate that is 10 times faster than the PC revolution, 2 times faster than the dot.com Internet boom, and 3 times faster than current social network adoption. iv Always on and always there, mobile devices have become integral part of our lives and our psyches. This means that mobile offers marketers countless opportunities to connect with audiences in a way that is more relevant and more powerful than ever before. ComScore predicts that mobile advertising in the U.S. alone will reach $2.5 billion by v While this is just a fraction of the overall online advertising market, we are only at the beginning of the mobile revolution, with the potential still largely untapped. As Internet analyst Mary Meeker notes, a comparison with more mature mobile markets, such as Japan, offers an indication of the tremendous revenue opportunities the mobile channel holds in store. Meeker predicts that mobile monetization in the U.S. could surpass the desktop within just one to three years. This means companies today have the rare chance to capitalize on a very unique and significant opportunity with mobile one they can t afford to ignore. The Challenges of Mobile To successfully harness the power of mobile, organizations need to offer compelling and responsive end user experiences. But while delivering interactions to a mobile device is superficially similar to traditional Internet desktop delivery, in reality it presents significant additional obstacles, due to the unique characteristics of mobile networks and the devices they serve. The rapid pace of innovation in the mobile market makes things more challenging as well. We now examine each of these areas in greater detail. Mobile Networks BOne of mobile s most powerful features is the ubiquity of the network and the fact that our devices are always with us, providing a truly always-connected experience that we have grown ever more reliant upon. In fact, more than half of those surveyed in the 2012 TIME Mobility Poll check their phones at least once every 30 minutes. vii For marketers, this not only provides the opportunity to engage consumers on the go or at the point of sale, but also opens untapped markets worldwide in areas where the fixed-line Internet has less reach. Even within highly developed fixed-line markets, this can be true: analyst firm IDC predicts that by 2015, mobile Internet users will surpass fixed line users in the U.S. vii

5 Innovating at the Pace of Mobile 5 The downside is that mobile networks were not designed for web traffic as fixed line networks and therefore experience many more speed and reliability issues. Compuware Gomez s industry benchmarks show that even among top U.S. brands, many of whom may have mobile-optimized sites, the end user experience is roughly four times slower on mobile versus the desktop. ix This represents a significant lost opportunity for businesses, since consumers expect much more: a recent study showed that that 71% of mobile users feel sites should be as responsive on their mobile devices as to their desktops, and 74% refuse to wait more than 5 seconds for a mobile site to load. x Indeed, studies repeatedly show the clear impact site performance can have on revenue and conversion rates. A 2012 Walmart analysis shows, for example, that the retailer saw a sharp decline in conversions and a high increase in as average page load time increased. Overall, shoppers who converted had experienced page load times that were nearly twice as fast as shoppers who didn t end up converting. Predictably, specific pages that had high load times also saw much higher bounce rates. xi Unfortunately, performance is a difficult problem for mobile sites and applications, as they must overcome first mile and middle mile bottlenecks just as traditional Web sites do for desktop clients but they face a far more difficult last mile. These slow and lossy mobile networks often have much higher degrees of latency (i.e., the time delay involved in sending a packet across the network and back) and packet loss than that of broadband fixed-line networks. Figure 1 below illustrates some of the key performance issues encountered. Bottlenecks in Mobile Site and Application Delivery Mobile Sites & Apps Mobile Network Internet GGSN RRt = ms (domestic) Device Mobile RTT = ms First Mile Scalability Reliability Security Middle Mile Internet congestion Routing problems International Latency Last Mile Slow cellular network speeds Extreme variability in latency Lossy and unreliable network

6 Innovating at the Pace of Mobile 6 Cellular networks higher packet loss and slower network speeds both negatively impact mobile performance. But the networks high latency, or network round trip time (RTT), is the biggest culprit. Not only is latency an order of magnitude slower across the mobile last mile, but it is also highly variable, fluctuating from moment to moment as network conditions and loads change, and as users move from one area of coverage to another. The problems are compounded when delivering mobile applications or web sites to mobile browsers, because each application page is typically made up of numerous requests, and while each individual request suffers from increased RTT, overall page performance degrades not linearly, but exponentially. As a result, the user experience deteriorates, the application becomes unusable, and your brand suffers. In addition, just as with the fixed-line Web, we see variability in mobile usage and network quality depending on time of day, the season, and flash crowd events where demand can quickly outstrip capacity. In addition, many other factors, ranging from signal strength, to cell tower capacity, to the network operator and type of carrier infrastructure deployed, can affect real-time latencies in the mobile network, making them far less predictable than their fixed line counterparts. Unfortunately, the volatile conditions and high latencies found across cellular networks can wreak havoc on the performance of both TCP and HTTP, the communications protocols used by mobile applications and web sites. Standard TCP, for example, is designed to provide reliable transport at the cost of performance. It simply is not tuned to work well under scenarios with high loss, high latency or highly variability all common in mobile networks. TCP and HTTP also have significant connection set up overhead that is exacerbated by long round trip times. To make matters worse, typically only a single HTTP request is utilized per TCP connection, so a single slow response can block the download of the rest of the page, which may include dozens of such requests. In a high latency situation, connections are sitting idle much of the time, waiting for the other side s response. Unfortunately, these inefficiencies translate into stalled downloads, unresponsive applications, and, ultimately, unhappy mobile users abandoning ship. Mobile Devices Understanding mobile devices including how they are used and how they fundamentally differ from traditional desktop environments is a second critical component to a successful mobile strategy. While the unique nature of mobile interactions presents a tremendous opportunity, the vast diversity of devices and mobile contexts poses a daunting challenge as well. The indispensable nature of mobile devices offers brands and businesses an abundance of new touch points for engaging with customers. We take our smartphones everywhere, relying on them to help us locate a nearby store or service, research a product, check the latest headlines, or check in with friends when we re on the go. For example, a recent Google/Ipsos survey showed that 96% of consumers have used their smartphone to research a product or service, 78% have them while shopping in brick and

7 Innovating at the Pace of Mobile 7 mortar stores, and 71% have used them in restaurants. xii Even at home, our tablets and phones are constantly in use; Nielson reports the 88% of tablet owners and 86% of smartphone owners in the U.S. use their devices while watching TV, for example. xiii Moreover, smartphones and tablets are truly personal devices and have access to important contextual information such as location data, as well as offering greater immediacy and relevancy to the consumer s immediate task. Combining this with the high level of engagement inspired by these in-hand devices and their touchscreens, mobile done right offers businesses the perfect setting to create meaningful and memorable interactions that will build their brand and grow their consumer base. Unfortunately, capitalizing on these opportunities is easier said than done. First, there are the limitations of the devices themselves. Mobile devices enjoy only a small fraction of the CPU power, memory, and storage space that desktop devices have. This can affect page and application response times and capabilities. In addition, the smaller display size of mobile devices creates the need for a more streamlined and focused user interface to offset the limited screen real estate. In most cases, successful mobile experiences can t be simply repurposed from the desktop. They require a clear strategy for managing and optimizing the user experience across a vast range of device and user scenarios. Already, smartphones and tablets come in an unprecedented range of form factors and capabilities, but they continue to proliferate as the brisk pace of technological advancement, coupled with the 24-month lifecycle of wireless carrier contracts, drives consumers to upgrade their devices more rapidly than ever before. It may not even be enough to simply design one site for smartphones and one for tablets, as the diversity within these subcategories is still tremendous. Differences in operating system, processor speed, screen size and resolution, browser capabilities, supported technologies (such as Flash or JavaScript), and protocol support, all significantly impact the end user experience. This makes creating, testing, maintaining and delivering high quality mobile experiences a particularly daunting task. Continuous Change A final key challenge in mobile is the unmatched velocity of change. Though the desktop Internet has evolved significantly over the past decade and continues to do so, the mobile space elevates the pace of innovation to a whole new level. Devices, networks, software, protocols, and standards are continually in flux, leaving businesses to grapple with many difficult decisions, starting with fundamentals: mobile web site, native app, or both? Build-off an existing desktop site, or create a separate one for mobile? Should we make the shift to responsive web design? Do we need separate tablet and phone apps? How many different types of tablets and phones should/can we support? Weighing heavily on decision-makers will be the most important question of all: how do we keep up and keep our mobile presence functioning as the landscape continually changes? Will my decisions today be obsolete before the project is even complete? While various point products continue to emerge in the marketplace to help companies overcome specific mobile challenges around performance and usability, these single-focus solutions leave too many other headaches unaddressed, and they may become wasted investments if mobile landscape shifts or if the business decides to change its mobile strategy.

8 Innovating at the Pace of Mobile 8 Finally, as mobile takes businesses into swiftly changing, uncharted territory, insight and intelligence into mobile consumption becomes an essential competitive advantage. Thus, in evaluating potential mobile strategies, companies need solutions that not only enable them to be agile and responsive to a rapidly evolving landscape, but that also deliver the data and insight that will allow them to make the right strategic decisions to drive their mobile channel to success. Akamai Aqua Ion Mobile: Simplifying and Optimizing Mobile Designed to help businesses overcome the unique challenges of the mobile landscape, Akamai Aqua Ion Mobile is the industry s first comprehensive mobile delivery platform for the optimized delivery of compelling mobile experiences to users across any device, on any network, anywhere. Built on the Akamai Intelligent Platform, Aqua Ion Mobile combines layers of mobile-specific optimizations with the proven performance, scale, and reliability of the Akamai Intelligent Platform, a cloudbased computing platform comprising more than 100,000 servers in over 1,000 networks across 78 countries worldwide to deliver a vastly superior experience to end users, whether they are using the mobile Web or native mobile applications with live data communications. In addition, by leveraging the unmatched reach and the unique device and network intelligence of the Akamai platform, Aqua Ion Mobile provides organizations with valuable insight into their audience s mobile consumption as well as the characteristics and capabilities of the devices being used. As a result, Aqua Ion Mobile customers should enjoy increased user adoption, higher conversion rates, greater cross-channel engagement, and an enhanced brand image. Aqua Ion Mobile also reduces the IT cost and complexity associated with mobile, while delivering unique mobile intelligence that helps keep our customers executing strategically ahead of the game. How Aqua Ion Mobile Works At a high level, Aqua Ion Mobile is a cloud-based service that works in a similar way to Akamai s other performance solutions such as Dynamic Site Accelerator, with our mobile-specific acceleration and intelligence services layered on top. The service is transparent to end users while enabling content providers to leverage the reach of Akamai s Intelligent Platform to deliver an optimal mobile experience to end users. When an end user s mobile browser or native mobile application makes a content request, it is quickly routed to a nearby server in Akamai s highly distributed global platform. This server is generally very near the mobile network s GGSN or IP gateway the point at which the cellular network connects to the Internet. Requested content may be served directly from this server s cache or requested from the origin server (the data center where the content ultimately originates) over an optimized connection. As appropriate, Akamai also intelligently applies additional mobile performance optimizations, such as Adaptive Image Compression, Front-End Optimization, and Mobile Detection & Redirect. Content is then accelerated to the end user via Akamai s Enhanced Mobile Protocol as well as browser specific optimization.

9 Innovating at the Pace of Mobile 9 Akamai pulls and caches content on servers in mobile IP gateways and other locations at the edge of the Internet, close to mobile users. Origin Server Akamai Edge Servers GGSN Wi-Fi Cellular Network Akamai intelligently applies mobile-specific acceleration capabilities and delivers to end users occurs over a mobile-optimized connection Figure 2: Akamai provides intelligent, mobile-optimized delivery from its globally distrubuted network To maximize quality of the end user experience, Aqua Ion Mobile offers a number of performance capabilities designed to address mobile-oriented challenges. These can be loosely categorized into optimization capabilities, intended to surmount the limitations of mobile networks, and intelligence capabilities, designed to deliver an enhanced user experience across the diverse range of mobile devices. Let s have a closer look at both. Optimized Performance Aqua Ion Mobile offers multiple performance optimization capabilities focused on improving the responsiveness of the mobile experience over both Wi-Fi and cellular networks. Most of these features speed up all types of HTTP communications, providing a cloud performance layer that accelerates any type of mobile strategy whether it be a native app, mobile site, responsive design site, or a hybrid of these. For middle mile acceleration, Aqua Ion Mobile leverages capabilities like SureRoute (which provides a fast path across the long-haul Internet) and intelligent TCP optimizations the same proven technologies that accelerate data across the Web for the world s leading sites and cloud applications. Compression and pre-fetching across the middle mile can also provide enormous benefit for mobile applications. In the last mile, where mobile differs significantly from the fixed-line Web, Akamai offers several mobile-specific optimizations. Akamai s Enhanced Mobile Protocol, along with its mobile network map and mobile caching technologies, seamlessly accelerate communications for all types of smart phone and tablet applications, including web, native, and hybrid apps.

10 Innovating at the Pace of Mobile 10 Mobile Network Map Akamai s globally distributed platform boasts an unparalleled edge server deployment, putting it in a unique position to minimize latency by caching and delivering as close to the end user as possible. For cellular users, servers are located in or near the mobile network s GGSN or IP gateway. For Wi-Fi users, servers are typically located within the ISP network itself. Mobile Caching Akamai improves cacheability of mobile content by enabling multiple versions of an object to be cached. Akamai s edge servers intelligently deliver the correct version based on incoming device characteristics, offloading the origin and enabling a faster and more targeted response for the end user. Enhanced Mobile Protocol The standard TCP and HTTP protocols are not necessarily well-suited to high-latency, high-packet-loss environments, so Akamai s Enhanced Mobile Protocol (EMP) detects such conditions in real-time and adjusts TCP parameters accordingly. EMP also supports HTTP pipelining, an optimization supported by many mobile browsers, which enables multiple requests to be made over the same HTTP connection, greatly reducing the delays due to the high round trip times found in cellular networks. Intelligent Performance Improving the mobile experience is not simply about overcoming the physical limitations of wireless networks, but also about being able to deliver the right experience for each type of mobile device, given the particular conditions that surrounding a given connection Akamai refers to this as situational performance or the ability to apply optimizations on a scenario-by-scenario basis. Doing this requires sophisticated knowledge about each data request, including information about device characteristics and real-time network conditions. Aqua Ion Mobile offers this intelligence, enabling content providers to seamlessly provide a differentiated experience for each end user request, without incurring the cost and complexity involved in having to keep up with a continually changing landscape of mobile devices and their capabilities. While many of the intelligence capabilities listed below are primarily relevant to web-based mobile scenarios (including mobile sites and responsive design sites, as well as hybrid native applications using a web view), certain features, like Adaptive Image Compression, can boost performance for all types of mobile apps. Adaptive Image Compression Akamai intelligently adjusts compression parameters for images in real time, as needed and according to content provider parameters, based on changing end user network conditions. This helps to deliver the optimal balance between image quality and download time. Users can enjoy high quality images when network conditions are good without suffering from slow performance when conditions are poor.

11 Innovating at the Pace of Mobile 11 Front End Optimization Akamai s automated Front-End Optimization (FEO) layer applies real-time transformations that streamline and speed up existing web content, using a wide range of techniques to reduce the number of HTTP requests, reduce the size of data requested, and accelerate browser page rendering. Akamai s sophisticated offline FEO analysis engine determines the appropriate optimizations for rendering given content on different devices, and Akamai s edge servers then apply those transformations dynamically based on the characteristics of each incoming request. Mobile Detection & Redirect For customers who maintain different web sites for different device categories, Akamai can detect the device and its salient characteristics, and then redirect end users to the appropriate site all from the edge of the network. This low-latency redirect minimizes end user wait time, offloads the origin server, and frees the content provider from having to maintain a continually changing database of device capabilities. Device Characterization Similar to Mobile Detection, Device Characterization is designed for customers who want to make decisions regarding which content should be delivered based on specific device characteristics and capabilities. Akamai s edge servers detect these capabilities (e.g. screen size, browser version, Flash support, JavaScript support), and provide the information back to the origin to serve differentiated content. In turn, these responses can be used to seed a device-based cache hierarchy that can deliver content to different devices that match particular characteristics. Partnering with a Platform As organizations look to harness the potential of mobile, there is great benefit in partnering with a solution that helps overcome mobile challenges in a holistic way. Akamai s Aqua Ion Mobile offers a comprehensive platform that delivers seamless performance from first mile to last, intelligently applying optimization layers tailored to the unique context of each request. In contrast to point products that address only a small piece of the puzzle and may quickly become obsolete as strategy shifts, Aqua Ion Mobile supports a broad range of mobile strategies, enabling companies to move with the agility and responsiveness critical to iterate and succeed in this rapidly evolving landscape.

12 Innovating at the Pace of Mobile 12 Optimizing the Mobile Experience from End-to-End First Mile Middle Mile last Mile GGSN Customer Infrastructure Akamai Intelligent Platform Aqua Ion Mobile Mobile Network Operator First Mile Short distance to nearest Akamai Server Presistent TCP connections Connection pooling Middle Mile SureRoute Persistent TCP connections Connection pooling TCP Window optimization Compression Last Mile Mobile Network Map Enhanced Mobile Protocol Mobile Detection & Redirect Mobile Front-End Optimization Adaptive Image Compression Device Characterization Because mobile optimization is not a straightforward, one-size-fits-all problem in fact, it is almost the antithesis a multi-layered approach like Akamai s offers the greatest flexibility. Each layer is only applied when relevant, but they work in concert with one another; for example, the Enhanced Mobile Protocol speeds up the last mile round-trip, while Front-End Optimization works to reduce the size of objects and the number of round-trips needed. The layered approach also allows content providers to take advantage of additional Akamai capabilities, including security offerings like Akamai s Web Application Firewall and Distributed Denial-of-Service protection, across their mobile channel. A layered approach can quickly become complex to manage, but the deep device and network intelligence built into Akamai s platform frees content providers from this complexity. With the platform s tremendous breadth and reach, Akamai enjoys unmatched insight into mobile traffic and its wide variety of use cases, driving its ability to intelligently deliver the right optimizations, even as devices evolve and network conditions change. For instance, FEO optimizations need to be customized for the end user environment, because different browsers and devices behave in different ways and thus require different optimizations. Images may also need to be re-sized differently for devices with different screen resolutions. In addition, a device connected over a lossy, high-latency network may benefit from different types of optimizations than a device running over a fast Wi-Fi connection. Akamai s network can take all these factors into consideration and seamlessly apply the right optimizations for each unique situation hiding the complexity from the origin server and allowing our customers to simply focus on their core mission of developing compelling content.

13 Innovating at the Pace of Mobile 13 Why Akamai To capitalize on the vast potential promised by the mobile market, businesses need to be able to offer high quality mobile experiences that consistently achieve the levels of responsiveness end users expect. With over a decade of proven expertise in delivering fast, reliable and secure user experiences, Akamai is uniquely positioned to help organizations deliver these compelling mobile experiences and succeed in the rapidly evolving mobile space. Built on a platform that is trusted by the world s leading brands to deliver over two trillion Internet interactions each day, Akamai Aqua Ion Mobile offers: Superior Performance. Aqua Ion Mobile addresses performance bottlenecks all the way from first mile to last, leveraging the unmatched reach of the Akamai network, along with optimizations intelligently tailored in real-time for each request, to deliver rich, responsive experiences to end users. Greater Flexibility. Akamai s layered platform approach supports a broad range of mobile strategies and allows content providers to seamlessly leverage new services on demand, giving them the agility necessary to iterate and innovate at the pace of mobile. Better Intelligence. By offering valuable insight into their audience s mobile usage, Akamai provides a competitive advantage to customers as they navigate the fast-changing mobile landscape. In addition, Akamai s ability to use real-time device and network intelligence enable it to seamlessly provide an optimal end experience to every user, on every device, across every network. Stronger Return on Investment. Akamai customers can enjoy stronger mobile adoption, higher conversion rates, and greater cross-channel engagement leading in turn to increased revenue and enhanced brand perception. At the same time, Akamai Aqua Ion Mobile reduces the complexity and cost associated with effective mobile delivery, allowing content providers to simply focus on executing their mobile strategy quickly, easily, and successfully.

14 i ii iii iv v vi vii viii ix x xi xii xiii xiv xv Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. The practice consists of a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSS media queries. (This helps) eliminate the need for a different design and development phase for each new gadget on the market. (from coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/12/guidelines-for-responsive-web-design/) Akamai is the leading cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere. At the core of the company s solutions is the Akamai Intelligent Platform providing extensive reach, coupled with unmatched reliability, security, visibility and expertise. Akamai removes the complexities of connecting the increasingly mobile world, supporting 24/7 consumer demand, and enabling enterprises to securely leverage the cloud. To learn more about how Akamai is accelerating the pace of innovation in a hyperconnected world, please visit and on Twitter. Asia Pacific Headquarters 1 Raffles Place, #16 61 One Raffles Place, Singapore Tel Fax European Headquarters Pfingstweidstrasse 60, 8005, Zurich, Switzerland Tel Fax North American Headquarters 8 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States Tel Fax Akamai Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission is prohibited. Akamai and the Akamai wave logo are registered trademarks. Other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners. Akamai believes that the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date; such information is subject to change without notice.