Akamai vs Riverbed

Akamai Technologies, Inc. is a content delivery network or CDN and cloud services provider headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. Akamai's content delivery network is one of the world's largest distributed computing platforms, responsible for serving between 15 and 30 percent of all web traffic. The company operates a network of servers around the world and rents capacity on these servers to customers who want their websites to work faster by distributing content from locations close to the user. Over the years their customers have included Apple, Facebook, Bing, Twitter and healthcare.gov. When a user navigates to the URL of an Akamai customer, their browser is redirected to one of Akamai's copies of this website, almost entirely invisible to the vast majority of its users.

Riverbed Technology, Inc. is an American company founded in 2002 with the goal of reducing the latency and bandwidth constraints in delivering applications via wide area networks to multiple locations across long distances. Riverbed is known primarily for pioneering WAN Optimization with Riverbed SteelHead, which first shipped in 2004 and continues to lead the market with over 50% market share. As information technology has evolved over the past decade and begun to move to the cloud, Riverbed has also evolved: Businesses increasingly rely on applications and data that run both in on-premises data centers as well as in the cloud, delivered to users over a mix of private networks and public networks. This is the hybrid enterprise, and Riverbed offers a platform to give enterprises visibility to deliver, control, and optimize IT resources across this hybrid enterprise.