Scribd
Upload
76 views

Chapter 3: Information Systems, Organizations, and Strategy

Uploaded by

MA Odranreb
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
76 views

Chapter 3: Information Systems, Organizations, and Strategy

Uploaded by

MA Odranreb
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 4

Chapter 3: Information Systems, Organizations, and Strategy

Case 1: National Basketball Association: Competing on Global Delivery With Akamai


OS Streaming

Tags: firm strategy; IT strategy; value chain; network based strategies; strategic
ecosystems; strategic partners.

Summary: The NBA uses Akamai’s global streaming video service to reach customers
and strategic partners in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and North America with
high quality video streams of NBA rich media content and programs.

URL: http://www.akamai.com/html/customers/testimonials/nba.html

NOTE: The Akamai video is a high quality video that requires a broadband connection
of greater than 5 MBPS. The video plays best at connection speeds of greater than 15
MBPS (Cable or FIOS ISP speeds). If you have trouble playing it on a Mozilla browser
(Firefox), switch to Internet Explorer. Also, if you let it play through once, the second
playback will be smoother because some of the content is cached on local servers and
your computer. Alternatively, find a campus or corporate network which has the
requisite bandwidth.

Case

“The National Basketball Association (NBA) is North America’s premier professional


men’s basketball league, composed of thirty teams: twenty-nine in the United States and
one in Canada. It is an active member of USA Basketball (USAB), which is recognized
by the International Basketball Federation as the National Governing Body (NGB) for
basketball in the United States. The NBA is one of the four major North American
professional sports leagues, which also include Major League Baseball (MLB), the
National Football League (NFL), and the National Hockey League (NHL).

An increasing number of international players have moved directly from playing


elsewhere in the world to starring in the NBA. The NBA is now televised in 212 nations
in 42 languages.” 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 then-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 Akamai’s 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.
Akamai’s primary service is provided by its proprietary EdgeNetwork. Akamai
transparently mirrors content sometimes all content including HTML and CSS, and
sometimes just media objects such as audio, graphics, animation, and video from
customer servers. Large firms deliver their content to over 40,000 Akamai servers in
70 countries. These local Akamai servers cache (store) this content awaiting local
demand. Akamai’s network is intelligent enough not to distribute content to a local
server until and unless there is local demand.

Figure 1-1 Akamai’s Global Content Distribution System

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 user’s
network location.”

Akamai’s EdgePlatform is one of the world’s 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.
Akamai’s 40,000 distributed servers allow it to monitor global Internet traffic
patterns, attacks on the Internet, and latency (delays caused by excessive Internet
traffic). Source: Akamai.com.

In addition to image caching, Akamai provides services which accelerate dynamic


and personalized content, and streaming media. Akamai’s personalization product
is called EdgeScape, a geolocation service. Much Web content delivered by
Akamai is personalized to the user’s location and Internet service types. This
allows Akamai’s 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: Verizon_Trademark_Services_LLC


 Country Code: US
 Region Code: NY
 City: NEWYORK
 Areacode: 212
 Latitude: 40.7128
 Longitude: 74.0092
 County: NEWYORK
 Timezone: EST
 Network: verizon
 Throughput: vhigh
Akamai Stream OS is another service that runs on Akamai’s EdgePlatform. It
enables the NBA to get more from its media by providing a simple, automated
solution for managing more than 45,000 media assets, assigning business policies,
and publishing content to multiple distribution channels.

o Since implementing Akamai Stream OS, NBA.com’s traffic has increased


exponentially, with over 35M unique users in 222 countries accessing
NBA Web content each month
o Akamai’s suite of products has helped the NBA reach record traffic levels,
with over 35M unique global users per month, while effectively
maintaining employment and infrastructure costs
o The reach and stability of Akamai’s network have allowed the NBA to
grow advertising revenues by 500% since 2001”

Resources: NBA.com; Akamai.com; Wikipedia.com

Case Study Questions

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

2. Using Porter’s generic strategies model, what do you think is the NBA’s 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 word “partnership” appears several times in the video. Who are the NBA’s
partners? How does the concept of a strategic ecosystem apply to the NBA’s
partnership strategies?

 
Copyright © 2009 Kenneth Laudon. Copyright © 2009 Pearson Education.

Copyright Notice
This work is protected by United States copyright laws and is provided solely for the use of
instructors in teaching their courses and assessing student learning. Dissemination or sale of any
part of this work (including on the World Wide Web) will destroy the integrity of the work and is not
permitted. The work and materials from this site should never be made available to students except
by instructors using the accompanying text in their classes. All recipients of this work are expected
to abide by these restrictions and to honor the intended pedagogical purposes and the needs of
other instructors who rely on these materials.

You might also like