ACADEMIA

Kontiki announced it will team up with IBM to offer companies a practical and elegant way to tap their unused computing resources to deliver rich media, including DVD quality video and software, to employees and customers with a 90% cost savings over traditional delivery methods. Working with IBM, Kontiki will offer an end-to-end solution, incorporating best of breed hardware and software from IBM and software from Kontiki to securely deliver rich media and software updates while greatly reducing the network and server capacity required to reach large audiences. "We've seen interest in rich media delivery -- over corporate networks and the Internet -- skyrocket in the last 12 months," said Bryan Plug, Kontiki's CEO and president. "Corporations are searching for ways to cost-effectively deliver high quality video and critical software updates to both employees and customers. Both Kontiki and IBM exploit on demand computing technologies to put a company's unused computing resources to work. By integrating our products, we can offer an ultra-scalable way to enable rich media delivery to virtually any size audience around the globe at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods." Kontiki will offer customers an end-to-end solution that incorporates Kontiki's Delivery Management System (DMS) software running on IBM's eServer systems. To complete this rich media delivery solution, the Kontiki DMS can fully integrate with IBM's products including Tivoli software and DB2 Universal Database. The joint solution can allow companies to securely deliver video and software updates in conjunction with existing software distribution systems to all employees, even to remote offices. Normally, delivery of large video and software files to a company's entire workforce can overwhelm a corporate network, possibly preventing other applications from working properly. The Kontiki and IBM solution addresses this problem by: -- Utilizing Grid Delivery to achieve a cost savings of 90% by dramatically reducing the need for central servers, distributed hardware caches, and WAN bandwidth. -- Improving the speed of delivering video and software updates to all employees by a factor of 10-25X over WAN only delivery. -- Providing a self-scaling system that automatically responds to large demand spikes without requiring additional servers and bandwidth. -- Reaching all users with critical video communications and software updates on the corporate network or the Internet. -- Providing a complete delivery solution with publishing, security, delivery management and detailed measurement tools. -- Integrating with existing enterprise systems such as software distribution and content management systems to enhance delivery. Kontiki's DMS is built on the company's patent-pending Grid Delivery Technology. Grid Delivery fundamentally improves the economics of rich media and software distribution by creating a secure grid of existing computing resources to efficiently deliver content and automatically adapt to increases in demand. Kontiki is also collaborating with IBM to bring grid delivery standards to a variety of enterprise systems. Kontiki is working with IBM to develop a set of standard web service API's to allow heterogeneous enterprise systems to seamlessly integrate with grid delivery systems such as the Kontiki DMS so that they can take full advantage of grid delivery capabilities.