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AKAMAI DELIVERS FOR LEADING SOUTH AMERICAN E-TAILERS

Akamai Technologies Inc announced increasing demand for its EdgeSuite service among South American businesses. Akamai has more than doubled its total customer base in South America through its resellers since the beginning of 2003, experiencing success in vertical markets that include retail, media & entertainment, education, government and air transportation.

Serving customers in Argentina and Chile through its resellers, Akamai is currently experiencing its highest customer growth in Brazil. Representing one of the most robust economies of South American countries, Brazil also boasts the continent's highest number of Internet users (12,269,533 active Internet users as of March 2004 per Nielsen/NetRatings).

Key to Akamai's success is the universal importance among leading businesses and online retailers to offer a high-performing and reliable end-user experience, while ensuring efficient delivery of e-commerce operations. The Akamai EdgeSuite service enables businesses to avoid the cost of building out their own infrastructure to support end-user traffic demands, choosing rather to rely on Akamai's secure global platform to distribute their Web content and applications.

Among new EdgeSuite customers within the last year are Brazil's leading e-retail destinations, including Americanas.com, Buscape, Magazine Luiza and Shoptime.

"Adopting the Akamai EdgeSuite service was simple and effective," said Bruno Villela, IT infrastructure manager of Shoptime. "From the most optimal Akamai server, our customers receive all the information requested to process their transactions such as images, video and even heavy documents for download. As a result, our servers are spared from an excessive amount of transactions, and we gain scalability to offer an easy and reliable means of purchasing via the Internet, all while saving on infrastructure costs."

As sales continue to expand in South America, Akamai has formed a strategic reseller relationship with Exceda. The terms of the agreement allow the companies to align Akamai's portfolio of services with Exceda's market knowledge and experience, thus creating a winning strategy for services deployment. South American customers are able to benefit from Akamai's leading technology, with local support (through Exceda) and services that meet their business requirements.

"We are excited about our relationship with Akamai," said Exceda's partner and managing director, Claudio Baumann. "Year after year, our market has shown two-digit growth rates in the volume of applications made available over the Internet. This makes our customers very receptive to Akamai's value proposition. By using Akamai's services, they are able to face the challenge of supporting high traffic rates with cost efficiency, while improving the end-user experience. We expect to increase our volume of business as more customers become acquainted with Akamai's value proposition."

The Akamai EdgeSuite service enables the generation and delivery of dynamic content that can be targeted and delivered from locations optimized for each end user. Given today's challenged IT budgets, the EdgeSuite service allows businesses to cost-effectively extend their critical Web infrastructure across Akamai's global platform, while retaining control of the business intelligence necessary to provide the optimal user experience.

"Customer adoption for Akamai's services in the Brazilian, and the overall South American markets, demonstrates our growing international sales," said Robert Hughes, vice president of Global Sales & Services at Akamai. "Today's news highlights four of Brazil's leading retail brands that are leveraging Akamai's global computing platform. We are excited to work with these companies, and to have partnered with Exceda, who has proven extremely proficient in representing and supporting Akamai's solutions in this market."

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