ISSN 2644-2876
APACCIOOUTLOOK.COM

Connecting the Enterprise IT
Community in Asia Pacific Countries

JUNE - 15 - 2020

CLOUD
SERVICESEDITION

KUSANAGIThe Next
Gen Ultrafast
CMS VirtualMachine

PRIME
STRATEGY

Kengyu Nakamura,CEO, & Developer ofKUSANAGI$15

COVER STORYPRIME
STRATEGY
KUSANAGI-The Next
Gen Ultrafast CMS
Virtual Machine

TOP 10

CLOUD
CONSULTING/SERVICE COMPANIES - 2020

We have built andprovided maintenance/
management for web
systems and largescale WordPress
sites of industryleading companies andeducational institutionsin Japan and abroad

BY ANNIE JOHNSONWordPress has a commanding 70
percent share in the world Content
Management System (CMS) sector.
The background of this massive shift
in the market is the cloudificationof websites. There was a time when web servers wereon-premises server-information operations, and CMS
licenses were budgeted and purchased along with theservers themselves. Now, most websites are built and run
via cloud services, so open-source CMSs that can handle
cloud-based accounting and construction are much moreaccessible. Among these, WordPress has nearly 50,000
free plug-ins and themes, allowing for impressive website
builds with no licensing fees. Some notable websites
based on WordPress are the White House website, andthe TED Blog.
But the many websites and blogs that use WordPress
experience issues with speed. WordPress generates

12 June, 2020

HTML upon receiving the user’s request, which canadversely affect loading time. In addition, as users installplug-ins and add blog content, site speed decreases
over time. Many factors are contributing to this lag inspeed, including database load, CPU load, memory, PHP
execution time, and, of course, website traffic. This,in turn, can lead to traffic bounce, revenue loss, anddecreased conversions and click-throughs.
"We have built and provided maintenance/management for web systems and large-scale WordPress
sites of industry-leading companies and educational
institutions in Japan and abroad," begins Kengyu
Nakamura, CEO of Prime Strategy.
Prime Strategy Group is a cloud integrator basedin Japan and across Asia, helping global companies
solve their cloud computing issues. With offices inTokyo, New York, Singapore, the company provides
cloud integration services around the world. Their three

Kengyu Nakamura,CEO, & Developer ofKUSANAGI

13 June, 2020

main business areas are cloud-based Website acceleration
service, Management service, and System integration
service. Among Prime Strategy’s customers are manylarge Japanese companies and educational institutions,
including: Mercedes-Benz Japan, Sanrio Company, Sega
Holdings, and Kanazawa University.
Prime Strategy has various key cloud partners such as
Microsoft Japan Co., Ltd. (Microsoft Azure), Amazon Web
Services Japan (Amazon Web Services), Alibaba CloudJapan Services Corporation (Alibaba Cloud), Google
Japan GK (Google Cloud Platform), IBM Japan, Ltd. (IBMCloud), and Oracle Corporation Japan (Oracle Cloud)among others.
In April 2020, Prime Strategy released an“announcement of company-wide AI integration”, whereby
it will move toward hyper automation across all areas of thecompany using the KUSANAGI Stack.

Service, where it provides all-inclusive maintenance,management, and speed tuning services for customers'
websites. It is available in 198 regions in 26 countries
around the world, and 28 major domestic and overseas
platforms, and the total number of operating machines
exceeds 40,000.
KUSANAGI is an execution environment that supports
WordPress and other CMSs and comes fine-tuned for speed
and security out of the box. It allows execution speeds up to10x faster than usual, depending on the usage environment.
WordPress's performance always degrades as content
volume increases, but KUSANAGI enables this weakness
to be shored up, and preventing WordPress from slowing
down makes it particularly popular with large enterprises.
With page caching enabled, KUSANAGI runs at several
thousand times faster speeds than the standard LAMP
environment. Even without page caching, it boosts speedby 10-15x. This means that theHow it all began?
server can run stably even during
We currently
Kengyu Nakamura founded Prime Strategy inan access spike. KUSANAGI
2002 at the age of 31. In 2012, Nakamura started
covers the web system security
supportwriting the most-read WordPress publication
standards necessary for businessin Japan, the "WordPress Textbook" series. It
with features like HTTPS,
media,
was later translated into Indonesian and Korean.
HTTP/2, and SSL certificates
educational,
In 2015, he published "Essential WordPress"
from Let's Encrypt. Sincefrom computer-related publishing powerhouse
KUSANAGI is built with open
corporate
O'Reilly Japan, and received a comment fromsource technology, anyone can
WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. He also
it and flexibly configuresites and other use
supervised the translation of O'Reilly Japan's
the environment to fit their"Building Web Apps with WordPress." Since then,application.
large-scale
Nakamura has been leading the development ofPrime Strategy provides
websites
the KUSANAGI Stack.
KUSANAGI Fully Managed
The KUSANAGI Stack is a collection ofService,
whichisbatch
internationally maintenance and tuning service
products-an AI system, engine, and OS-basedaround the ultra-fast and secure CMS virtualfor everything from server tomachine KUSANAGI.
WordPress itself. The company will fine-tune everything:
the handling of hardware and middleware, revisions ofKUSANAGI
themes and plug-ins, optimization of SQL, and reviewing
Developed by Prime Strategy, KUSANAGI is a free, of the database structure. With measures in place toopen-source virtual machine image that runs WordPress at continuously improve and maintain performance, Primeindustry-leading speeds. With a quad-core (4vCPU) virtual Strategy offers a whole-package deal where it manages
machine, WordPress execution time is brought to under the operation of WordPress sites and servers, including
four milliseconds and can handle over 1,000 requests per KUSANAGI's cloud hosting. This service eliminates thesecond, even without page caching. With page caching, complications of running and maintaining the web system,
and a 4vCPU, KUSANAGI can process over 60,000-page keeps the server running stably, and takes care of security.
requests per second.
The service also includes technical support, fault handling,
The ultra-fast CMS virtual machine KUSANAGI was monitoring, backups, and updates among others. "Wecreated using virtual machine server-building techniques currently support media, educational, corporate sites andthat Prime Strategy has been developing since 2006. In other large-scale websites internationally," adds Nakamura.
addition to offering KUSANAGI free of charge on major
For instance, in 2017, Mercedes-Benz Japan launched apublic cloud services both inside and outside on Japan, renewal project to reach a broader customer base. Instead ofthe firm also offers the paid KUSANAGI Official Support focusing primarily on the development of Mercedes-Benz

14 June, 2020features and performance, the company decided to increase
the number of articles and images that would appeal tovisitors' feelings and senses in a more right-brained way.
Anticipating higher traffic after the renewal as visitors flowin from various media sources, they chose the Microsoft
Azure cloud platform to ensure the site's stability. Now,after implementing KUSANAGI, even after a 3.5x increasein page views, the system continues to run reliably.
WEXAL Page Speed Technology & AI DavidIn 2019, Prime Strategy launched WEXAL Page SpeedTechnology, and the WEXAL Mobile Site Loading SpeedBoost Service, which uses WEXAL Page Speed Technology.
It is a web system speed-tuning engine that is available
with KUSANAGI's paid Premium Edition. One key featurethat cannot be imitated by any other company in the market
today is real-time optimization of all web resources (HTML,JS, CSS, images) without any modification of the original
website source code necessary. This enables users to speedtune their system stress-free. For example, when images
are optimized, they are converted into the newest imageformats, and the web site can respond to the user with theone that will load the fastest. Also, the Engagement Delayfeature controls the delaying of resources in compliancewith Google's recommendation to postpone running any
resources unrelated to the first view. As a result, the Google
PageSpeed Insights score is greatly improved.
In 2020, Prime Strategy launched the WEXAL Reverse
Proxy Limited Edition, which makes it possible to use
WEXAL via reverse proxy, and therefore eliminates theneed for server migration. The ongoing development has
also included a dedicated administrator panel to make
operating WEXAL simple.

Prime Strategy also developed an artificial intelligencesystem, AI David, that automatically creates the WEXAL
optimization strategy for each page. It does this withtools like RPA and machine learning clustering to create
a settings file with an optimization strategy for each page.
AI David removes manual labor associated with web page
speed tuning.
Prime Strategy's WEXAL Mobile Site Loading SpeedBoost Service implements the "WEXAL Page Speed
Technology" speed-tuning engine. It speed-tunes each
aspect of the site through resource optimization, adjusting
execution order, and other methods to boost loading speed.
AI directs the optimization, so users do not have to makechanges themselves. As a result, no attention needs to be
directed towards boosting speed, and time can be spent onbuilding their business site.
What Lies Ahead for Prime Strategy"Everything we do is in the interest of developing theEnterprise Open Source Software ecosystem," statesNakamura. Prime Strategy's mission is to develop anecosystem allowing customers to use faster, safer, andmore reliable open source software for their businesses.
Forging ahead, Prime Strategy will continue todevelop and offer the AI, engine and OS that make up
the KUSANAGI Stack. Prime Strategy also plans toexpand its user base and establish KUSANAGI outsideof just being a virtual machine into a container andthen as part of a cloud service to make it easier to use.
"Optimizing and boosting web site speed are challenges
that many people are still facing. We will continue todevelop new services to take care of these obstacles,"
adds Nakamura.

15 June, 2020

JUNE - 15 - 2020

ISSN 2644-2876

APACCIOOUTLOOK.COMme Strategyir
P

ISSN 2644-2876
APACCIOOUTLOOK.COMConnecting the Enterprise IT
Community in Asia Pacific Countries

MAY - 2020

CLOUD
EDITION

KUSANAGIThe Next
Gen Ultrafast
CMS VirtualMachine

CLOUD

PRIME
STRATEGYCONSULTING/SERVICECOMPANIES - 2020Aw
arded by APAC CIOou tl oKengyu Nakamura,CEO, & Developer ofKUSANAGI$15ok

Prime Strategy
CLOUD
CONSULTING/SERVICECOMPANIES - 2020Aw
arded by APAC CIOou tl ook

The annual listing of 10 companies that are at the forefront of providing
Cloud consulting/services and impacting the APAC industry

Annie Johnson
Annie Johnson
Managing Editor