AdForce Partners with Akamai to Speed Ad Delivery

Ad delivery and management firm AdForce, which is majority-owned by CMGI, on Thursday teamed with Akamai Technologies, a company whose
product speeds the delivery of data over the Web, in an effort to boost the
efficiency of ad delivery.

As the Net grows more congested and marketers seek to experiment with rich
media advertising, the problem of speedy and reliable delivery becomes a
serious one, which AdForce is trying to address with this partnership.

“Together, we intend to remove the technological barriers to the deployment
of Internet-based marketing programs,” says George Conrades, chairman and
chief executive officer of Akamai.

Additionally, the AdForce deal is part of a cozy relationship between CMGI
and Akamai. Last month the two companies launched a joint effort to
Akamai-enable sites within the CMGI network, and pledged to work together
on new technologies for the delivery of dynamic content and applications.
So far, four CMGI-affiliated companies — AltaVista, NaviSite, NaviNet, and 1stUp.com are working with Akamai to
improve the speed of their sites.

The technology to speed delivery is based on the idea of placing content
and applications as close as possible to the end user. To that end, Akamai
has built a network of 2,000 servers in 40 countries across 100 different
telecommunications networks.