This is a Information Technology Question:

This case study examines issues surrounding consistent delivery of content in a global environment. The NBA chose Akamai as its content delivery provider. You probably receive content from Akamai on a regular basis when you surf the web and might not have even known it. Akamai's business model involves delivering content where the user is not aware that the content is coming from a variety of Content Delivery Network (CDN) nodes. How can organizations where you work leverage a CDN?

UPDATE: While this case study is still valid, the NBA has changed directions (sort of) and entered into a new partnership with Microsoft to provide both live and on-demand streaming of games. They will still use Akamai, but Akamai has now integrated its Content Delivery Network with Microsoft's Azure platform. These things happen frequently in our business environment. While the NBA has changed its strategy, the principles behind their former partnership with Akamai remain relevant.

Instructions:

Read the Case Study included at the bottom of this page. Answer the 5 questions at the end of the Case Study and submit your answers in a single MS Word document via Canvas. Your answer for each question should include at least one supporting argument for your answer or position. Be sure to clearly support your argument justifying your position.

CASE STUDY

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is the leading professional basketball league in the United States and Canada with 30 teams. The NBA is one of four North American professional sports leagues. The other leagues are the Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and the National Hockey League. While focused on the North America, the NBA has a large international following and is televised in 212 countries and 42 languages around the world.

Increasingly, fans want and expect high quality game videos, RSS feeds, widgets, and Fantasy leagues. NBA.com has an inventory of over 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 provides a distributed computing platform for global Internet content and application delivery. Akamai is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was founded in 1998 by MIT graduate student Daniel Lewin, along with MIT Applied Mathematics professor Tom Leighton and MIT Sloan School of Management students Jonathan Seelig and Preetish Nijhawan. Leighton still serves as Akamais Chief Scientist, while Lewin was killed aboard American Airlines flight 11 which was crashed in the September 11 attacks of 2001. Akamai is a Hawaiian word meaning smart or intelligent. Akamais primary service is provided by its proprietary EdgeNetwork. Akamai transparently mirrors contentsometimes all content, including HTML and CSS, and sometimes just media objects such as audio, graphics, animation, and videofrom customer servers. Large firms deliver their content to over 240,000 Akamai servers in 130 countries in 2019. These local Akamai servers cache (store) this content awaiting local demand. Akamais network is intelligent enough not to distribute content to a local server until and unless there is local demand.

When you click on an online video at NBA.com, the domain name is the same, but the IP address points to an Akamai server rather than the NBA server. The Akamai server is automatically picked depending on the type of content and the users network location. Akamais EdgePlatform is one of the worlds largest distributed computing platforms. The benefit is that users can receive content from whichever Akamai server is closest to them or has a good connection, leading to faster download times and less vulnerability to network congestion or outages. The Internet was never designed to handle large volumes of video simultaneously streaming from a single corporate server to all Internet devices. However, this content can be sent to the edge of the network where Akamai servers are located, and on a local or regional basis, stream this content on demand from local servers. Akamais 216,000 distributed servers allow it to monitor global Internet traffic patterns, attacks on the Internet, and latency (delays caused by excessive Internet traffic). In addition to image caching, Akamai provides services which accelerate dynamic and personalized content and streaming media. Akamais personalization product is called EdgeScape, a geolocation service. Much Web content delivered by Akamai is personalized to the users location and Internet service types. This allows Akamais customers to gain insight into where end users are coming from and what kind of Internet service they are using. Armed with this knowledge they can customize Web content for individual end users through a wide range of criteria, making their site more relevant and compelling to everyone who visits.

For instance, Akamai knows your: Internet service provider: Country Code: US Region Code: NY City: NEWYORK Area code: 212 Latitude: 40.7128 Longitude: 74.0092 County: NEWYORK Time zone: EST Network: verizon Throughput: vhigh

Akamai Stream OS is another service that runs on Akamais EdgePlatform. It enables the NBA to get more from its media by providing a simple, automated solution for managing more than 500,000 media assets, assigning business policies, and publishing content to multiple distribution channels. NBA.com and NBA Mobile reached a combined 16.7 billion page views and 4.2 billion video views in 2015. The NBAs new Game Time mobile app set a new record with 7.5 million global downloads in 2015. Since implementing Akamai Stream OS, NBA.coms traffic has increased exponentially, with over 60M unique users in 222 countries accessing NBA Web content each month. Akamais suite of products has helped the NBA reach record traffic levels while effectively maintaining employment and infrastructure costs. The reach and stability of Akamais network have allowed the NBA to grow advertising revenues by 500 percent since 2001.

CASE QUESTIONS

1. Using Porters competitive forces model, analyze the NBAs market situation. How does the use of Akamai help the NBA compete in this market?

2. Using Porters generic strategies model (Table 3.4), what do you think is the NBAs overall strategy or strategies?

3. Why is it important that all fans in the world have the same experience?

4. Why is it important that individual franchise owners can build, manage, and distribute on the NBA platform their own content?

5. The NBA relies on a number of "partnerships to deliver its product (live & recorded games, merchandizing, etc.). Who are the NBAs partners? How does the concept of a strategic ecosystem apply to the NBAs partnership strategies?