Akamai Accelerates Pacific Sunwear Website Leveraging Dynamic Site Accelerator Services

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leading global service provider for accelerating content and applications online, today announced that Pacific Sunwear of California, Inc. (NASDAQ: PSUN), a leading specialty retailer of everyday causal apparel, accessories and footwear, has implemented the Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator services for accelerating and improving the performance of its PacSun.com retail site.

PacSun.com, a key extension of the company's retail store PacSun, is continuously taking measures to improve website performance. Pacific Sunwear has selected Akamai to help address its goals and extend its existing infrastructure without additional build-out costs. By leveraging Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator services, Akamai offloads the PacSun.com servers by up to 80%, allowing the retailer to effectively deliver its brand and have the flexibility to release content as needed.

"Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator solution is a clear choice for us and allows us to serve richer, more engaging content that we believe will exceed our customers' expectations," commented Stacy Clark, Pacific Sunwear's Senior Director of E-Commerce. "Since implementing the Akamai services, we have seen significant improvements in our site performance, especially during peak seasons. Akamai helps us deliver pages 75% faster, and dynamic content – such as shopping cart transactions – 55% faster, on average. Akamai's solutions have dramatically increased our confidence in the performance of PacSun.com. We no longer expend significant time and resources preparing for unpredictable peak traffic patterns."

Pacific Sunwear also relies on Akamai to deliver a superior customer experience for their end users. As Pacific Sunwear continues to add richer, dynamic content to drive traffic to its PacSun.com online store, site performance becomes paramount. "Since leveraging the Akamai solution, we have mitigated the Internet latency issues that can interfere with a satisfactory e-commerce experience. We have experienced an improvement in latency by up to 30%, resulting in a consistent experience regardless of the channel our customers choose." Clark added.

As tracked by Gomez, a provider of on–demand Web application experience management solutions, Pacific Sunwear has realized 99.9% uptime since evolving its Web performance strategy to include the use of Akamai services. Switching from a caching-based CDN offering to Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator solution has also enabled the retailer's site performance and uptime ratings to undergo a 75% increase. The results now indicate that the PacSun.com site is performing better than the industry average.

"As retailers continue to add more dynamic and rich content to their sites, it is crucial for them to be able to cope with the traffic and deliver a fast, reliable site for consumers," said Brad Rinklin, vice president of marketing, Akamai Technologies. "With the increasing number of younger audiences interacting online nowadays, they have less patience to wait for a site to load when searching for a specific product. Leveraging Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator solution, retailers are enabled to deliver an enhanced, reliable user experience to their end users and, as a result, the customers should keep coming back to their sites."

Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator helps accelerate the delivery of dynamic, rich interactive content and meets today's consumer expectations for a fast-loading, always available site, regardless of the number of images, amount of dynamically generated content or Internet conditions. Dynamic Site Accelerator is built on Akamai's globally distributed platform – the most pervasive platform for content delivery and Web site acceleration, comprising 30,000 servers in 70 countries within nearly 1,000 networks. Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator gives performance that is up to five times faster than on original Web infrastructure.