This is a Information Technology Question: PLEASE READ BELOW AND WRITE IN DETAIL. This case study examines issues surrou
Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2022 6:05 am
This is a Information Technology Question:
PLEASE READ BELOW AND WRITE IN DETAIL.
This case study examines issues surrounding consistent deliveryof content in a global environment. The NBA chose Akamai as itscontent delivery provider. You probably receive content from Akamaion a regular basis when you surf the web and might not have evenknown it. Akamai's business model involves delivering content wherethe user is not aware that the content is coming from a variety ofContent Delivery Network (CDN) nodes. How can organizations whereyou work leverage a CDN? UPDATE: While this case study is stillvalid, the NBA has changed directions (sort of) and entered into anew partnership with Microsoft to provide both live and on-demandstreaming of games. They will still use Akamai, but Akamai has nowintegrated its Content Delivery Network with Microsoft's Azureplatform. These things happen frequently in our businessenvironment. While the NBA has changed its strategy, the principlesbehind their former partnership with Akamai remain relevant.Instructions: Read the Case Study included at the bottom of thispage. Answer the 5 questions at the end of the Case Study andsubmit your answers in a single MS Word document via Canvas. Youranswer for each question should include at least one supportingargument for your answer or position. Be sure to clearly supportyour argument justifying your position. CASE STUDY The NationalBasketball Association (NBA) is the leading professional basketballleague in the United States and Canada with 30 teams. The NBA isone of four North American professional sports leagues. The otherleagues are the Major League Baseball, the National FootballLeague, and the National Hockey League. While focused on the NorthAmerica, the NBA has a large international following and istelevised in 212 countries and 42 languages around the world.Increasingly, fans want and expect high quality game videos, RSSfeeds, widgets, and Fantasy leagues. NBA.com has an inventory ofover 400,000 digital assets, including 15,000 videos. Last year,there were over 850 unique visits to NBA.com from 20 countries.Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM) is a company that providesa distributed computing platform for global Internet content andapplication delivery. Akamai is headquartered in Cambridge,Massachusetts. The company was founded in 1998 by MIT graduatestudent Daniel Lewin, along with MIT Applied Mathematics professorTom Leighton and MIT Sloan School of Management students JonathanSeelig and Preetish Nijhawan. Leighton still serves as Akamai’sChief Scientist, while Lewin was killed aboard American Airlinesflight 11 which was crashed in the September 11 attacks of 2001.Akamai is a Hawaiian word meaning smart or intelligent. Akamai’sprimary service is provided by its proprietary EdgeNetwork. Akamaitransparently mirrors content—sometimes all content, including HTMLand CSS, and sometimes just media objects such as audio, graphics,animation, and video—from customer servers. Large firms delivertheir content to over 240,000 Akamai servers in 130 countries in2019. These local Akamai servers cache (store) this contentawaiting local demand. Akamai’s network is intelligent enough notto distribute content to a local server until and unless there islocal demand. When you click on an online video at NBA.com, thedomain name is the same, but the IP address points to an Akamaiserver rather than the NBA server. The Akamai server isautomatically picked depending on the type of content and theuser’s network location. Akamai’s EdgePlatform is one of theworld’s largest distributed computing platforms. The benefit isthat users can receive content from whichever Akamai server isclosest to them or has a good connection, leading to fasterdownload times and less vulnerability to network congestion oroutages. The Internet was never designed to handle large volumes ofvideo simultaneously streaming from a single corporate server toall Internet devices. However, this content can be sent to the“edge” of the network where Akamai servers are located, and on alocal or regional basis, stream this content on demand from localservers. Akamai’s 216,000 distributed servers allow it to monitorglobal Internet traffic patterns, attacks on the Internet, andlatency (delays caused by excessive Internet traffic). In additionto image caching, Akamai provides services which accelerate dynamicand personalized content and streaming media. Akamai’spersonalization product is called EdgeScape, a geolocation service.Much Web content delivered by Akamai is personalized to the user’slocation and Internet service types. This allows Akamai’s customersto gain insight into where end users are coming from and what kindof Internet service they are using. Armed with this knowledge theycan customize Web content for individual end users through a widerange of criteria, making their site more relevant and compellingto everyone who visits. For instance, Akamai knows your: Internetservice provider: Country Code: US Region Code: NY City: NEWYORKArea code: 212 Latitude: 40.7128 Longitude: 74.0092 County: NEWYORKTime zone: EST Network: verizon Throughput: vhigh Akamai Stream OSis another service that runs on Akamai’s EdgePlatform. It enablesthe NBA to get more from its media by providing a simple, automatedsolution for managing more than 500,000 media assets, assigningbusiness policies, and publishing content to multiple distributionchannels. NBA.com and NBA Mobile reached a combined 16.7 billionpage views and 4.2 billion video views in 2015. The NBA’s new GameTime mobile app set a new record with 7.5 million global downloadsin 2015. Since implementing Akamai Stream OS, NBA.com’s traffic hasincreased exponentially, with over 60M unique users in 222countries accessing NBA Web content each month. Akamai’s suite ofproducts has helped the NBA reach record traffic levels whileeffectively maintaining employment and infrastructure costs. Thereach and stability of Akamai’s network have allowed the NBA togrow advertising revenues by 500 percent since 2001. CASE QUESTIONS1. Using Porter’s competitive forces model, analyze the NBA’smarket situation. How does the use of Akamai help the NBA competein this market? 2. Using Porter’s generic strategies model (Table3.4), what do you think is the NBA’s overall strategy orstrategies? 3. Why is it important that all fans in the world havethe same experience? 4. Why is it important that individualfranchise owners can build, manage, and distribute on the NBAplatform their own content? 5. The NBA relies on a number of"partnerships” to deliver its product (live & recorded games,merchandizing, etc.). Who are the NBA’s partners? How does theconcept of a strategic ecosystem apply to the NBA’s partnershipstrategies?
PLEASE READ BELOW AND WRITE IN DETAIL.
This case study examines issues surrounding consistent deliveryof content in a global environment. The NBA chose Akamai as itscontent delivery provider. You probably receive content from Akamaion a regular basis when you surf the web and might not have evenknown it. Akamai's business model involves delivering content wherethe user is not aware that the content is coming from a variety ofContent Delivery Network (CDN) nodes. How can organizations whereyou work leverage a CDN? UPDATE: While this case study is stillvalid, the NBA has changed directions (sort of) and entered into anew partnership with Microsoft to provide both live and on-demandstreaming of games. They will still use Akamai, but Akamai has nowintegrated its Content Delivery Network with Microsoft's Azureplatform. These things happen frequently in our businessenvironment. While the NBA has changed its strategy, the principlesbehind their former partnership with Akamai remain relevant.Instructions: Read the Case Study included at the bottom of thispage. Answer the 5 questions at the end of the Case Study andsubmit your answers in a single MS Word document via Canvas. Youranswer for each question should include at least one supportingargument for your answer or position. Be sure to clearly supportyour argument justifying your position. CASE STUDY The NationalBasketball Association (NBA) is the leading professional basketballleague in the United States and Canada with 30 teams. The NBA isone of four North American professional sports leagues. The otherleagues are the Major League Baseball, the National FootballLeague, and the National Hockey League. While focused on the NorthAmerica, the NBA has a large international following and istelevised in 212 countries and 42 languages around the world.Increasingly, fans want and expect high quality game videos, RSSfeeds, widgets, and Fantasy leagues. NBA.com has an inventory ofover 400,000 digital assets, including 15,000 videos. Last year,there were over 850 unique visits to NBA.com from 20 countries.Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM) is a company that providesa distributed computing platform for global Internet content andapplication delivery. Akamai is headquartered in Cambridge,Massachusetts. The company was founded in 1998 by MIT graduatestudent Daniel Lewin, along with MIT Applied Mathematics professorTom Leighton and MIT Sloan School of Management students JonathanSeelig and Preetish Nijhawan. Leighton still serves as Akamai’sChief Scientist, while Lewin was killed aboard American Airlinesflight 11 which was crashed in the September 11 attacks of 2001.Akamai is a Hawaiian word meaning smart or intelligent. Akamai’sprimary service is provided by its proprietary EdgeNetwork. Akamaitransparently mirrors content—sometimes all content, including HTMLand CSS, and sometimes just media objects such as audio, graphics,animation, and video—from customer servers. Large firms delivertheir content to over 240,000 Akamai servers in 130 countries in2019. These local Akamai servers cache (store) this contentawaiting local demand. Akamai’s network is intelligent enough notto distribute content to a local server until and unless there islocal demand. When you click on an online video at NBA.com, thedomain name is the same, but the IP address points to an Akamaiserver rather than the NBA server. The Akamai server isautomatically picked depending on the type of content and theuser’s network location. Akamai’s EdgePlatform is one of theworld’s largest distributed computing platforms. The benefit isthat users can receive content from whichever Akamai server isclosest to them or has a good connection, leading to fasterdownload times and less vulnerability to network congestion oroutages. The Internet was never designed to handle large volumes ofvideo simultaneously streaming from a single corporate server toall Internet devices. However, this content can be sent to the“edge” of the network where Akamai servers are located, and on alocal or regional basis, stream this content on demand from localservers. Akamai’s 216,000 distributed servers allow it to monitorglobal Internet traffic patterns, attacks on the Internet, andlatency (delays caused by excessive Internet traffic). In additionto image caching, Akamai provides services which accelerate dynamicand personalized content and streaming media. Akamai’spersonalization product is called EdgeScape, a geolocation service.Much Web content delivered by Akamai is personalized to the user’slocation and Internet service types. This allows Akamai’s customersto gain insight into where end users are coming from and what kindof Internet service they are using. Armed with this knowledge theycan customize Web content for individual end users through a widerange of criteria, making their site more relevant and compellingto everyone who visits. For instance, Akamai knows your: Internetservice provider: Country Code: US Region Code: NY City: NEWYORKArea code: 212 Latitude: 40.7128 Longitude: 74.0092 County: NEWYORKTime zone: EST Network: verizon Throughput: vhigh Akamai Stream OSis another service that runs on Akamai’s EdgePlatform. It enablesthe NBA to get more from its media by providing a simple, automatedsolution for managing more than 500,000 media assets, assigningbusiness policies, and publishing content to multiple distributionchannels. NBA.com and NBA Mobile reached a combined 16.7 billionpage views and 4.2 billion video views in 2015. The NBA’s new GameTime mobile app set a new record with 7.5 million global downloadsin 2015. Since implementing Akamai Stream OS, NBA.com’s traffic hasincreased exponentially, with over 60M unique users in 222countries accessing NBA Web content each month. Akamai’s suite ofproducts has helped the NBA reach record traffic levels whileeffectively maintaining employment and infrastructure costs. Thereach and stability of Akamai’s network have allowed the NBA togrow advertising revenues by 500 percent since 2001. CASE QUESTIONS1. Using Porter’s competitive forces model, analyze the NBA’smarket situation. How does the use of Akamai help the NBA competein this market? 2. Using Porter’s generic strategies model (Table3.4), what do you think is the NBA’s overall strategy orstrategies? 3. Why is it important that all fans in the world havethe same experience? 4. Why is it important that individualfranchise owners can build, manage, and distribute on the NBAplatform their own content? 5. The NBA relies on a number of"partnerships” to deliver its product (live & recorded games,merchandizing, etc.). Who are the NBA’s partners? How does theconcept of a strategic ecosystem apply to the NBA’s partnershipstrategies?