The company had looked at several alternatives but chose one that required no client software and minimal changes on the server side yet still cuts download times by more than 80% in some cases, says Katey Schuyler, senior manager, media management systems for Getty Images.

The company considered 's Web acceleration service, as well as software and hardware from , , , and .

All accelerated traffic, but FastSoft had the edge, Schuyler says. "We tested all of those and saw performance gains in just about all of them, and the best gains came from Fastsoft, It was as good or better than everything else," she says. However that wasn't the determining factor. "It was really the ease of install for Fastsoft that was the clincher for us."

In particular, FastSoft requires adding one of its Aria appliance in each of Getty Images' data centers with no software changes to machines making the downloads, she says. The Fastsoft boxes are connected to WAN routers that use policy based routing to determine by IP address what traffic is accelerated.

Getty Images sells two services, both of which involve hosting content for customers that is then downloaded directly to the customers' customers. Each Getty Images customer could have hundreds or thousands of customers of their own, so distributing client software was not an option, she says.