| Type | Public company |
|---|---|
| Traded as | NASDAQ: AKAM NASDAQ-100 Component S&P 500 Component |
| Industry | Content delivery networks |
| Founded | 1998 |
| Founder(s) | Tom Leighton Daniel M. Lewin |
| Headquarters | Cambridge, Massachusetts, US |
| Key people | George H. Conrades (Chairman) Paul L. Sagan (CEO & President) |
| Products | Content delivery |
| Revenue | US$ 1.024 billion (2010)[1] |
| Operating income | US$ 254.3 million (2010)[1] |
| Net income | US$ 171.2 million (2010)[1] |
| Total assets | US$ 2.323 billion (2010)[1] |
| Total equity | US$ 2.178 billion (2010)[1] |
| Employees | 2,200 (December 2010)[1] |
| Website | Akamai.com |
Akamai Technologies, Inc. ( /ˈɑːkəmaɪ/; NASDAQ: AKAM) is an Internet content delivery network headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US.
The company was founded in 1998 by then-MIT graduate student Daniel M. Lewin, and MIT Applied Mathematics professor Tom Leighton. Lewin was killed aboard American Airlines flight 11 which crashed in the September 11 attacks of 2001.
Leighton still serves as Akamai's Chief Scientist.
Akamai is a Hawaiian word meaning smart or intelligent with connotations of insightful or wise or skillful.
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Leighton has served as head of the Algorithms Group at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science since its inception in 1996. Leighton believed that a solution to Web congestion could be found in applied mathematics and algorithms. He solicited the help of graduate student Danny Lewin and several others. Together they developed the mathematical algorithms necessary to handle the dynamic routing of content and work towards this aim.
In late 1998 and early 1999, a group of Internet business professionals joined the founding team. Most notably, Paul Sagan who was a former President of Time Inc. New Media, a founder of Road Runner cable modem service and who helped launch NY 1 News, became chief operating officer and eventually president of Akamai Technologies. George Conrades, former chairman and chief executive officer of BBN Corp. and senior vice president of U.S. Operations for IBM, joined as chief executive officer a few months later. The company launched commercial service in April 1999.
Between 2003 and 2009, Akamai’s "revenue grew at a compounded annual growth rate of more than 32%, with a 26% operating margin in 2009. Akamai also broadened its worldwide customer base, with 28% of 2009 revenue coming from outside the United States, up from 23% two years earlier." Part of this growth came from Akamai’s core content delivery service.[2]
Akamai provides a service to companies that have content on the Internet (Akamai's customers), to more efficiently deliver this content to users browsing the Web and downloading content. Akamai does this by transparently mirroring content—sometimes all site content including HTML, CSS, and software downloads, and sometimes just media objects such as audio, graphics, animation, and video—from customer servers. Though the domain name (but not subdomain) is the same, the IP address points to an Akamai server or another user's machine that Akamai is using as a server rather than the customer's server. The Akamai server is automatically picked depending on the type of content and the user's network location.
The benefit is that users can receive content from whichever Akamai server or user is close to them or has a good connection, leading to faster download times and less vulnerability to network congestion or outages.
In addition to content caching, Akamai provides services which accelerate dynamic and personalized content, J2EE-compliant applications, and streaming media to the extent that such services frame a localized perspective.
Akamai Technologies owns about 60 other domains, but the primary domains it uses are:
In addition to using Akamai's own servers, Akamai delivers content from other end-users' computers, in a form of peer-to-peer networking [3][4] When users request a download of some large files served by this system, they are prompted to download and install "Akamai NetSession Interface, a download manager used to reduce download time and increase quality." [5] However, this software is not just a download manager, delivering content from the Internet to the user's computer, but it also a peer-to-peer server, delivering content cached on the user's computer to other users' computers. The user agreement describes this vaguely as
The Akamai web site describes this system as follows:
Akamai claims it operates a distributed computed platform called EdgePlatform made of a growing number of networked servers, located in many PoPs (points of presence) in various countries around the world, in several networks: 95,000 servers in 1,900 networks across 71 countries, in August 2011.[6]
On July 21, 1999, at Macworld Expo New York, Apple and Akamai announced a strategic partnership to build Apple's new media network, QuickTime TV (QTV), based on QuickTime Streaming Server.[7] Both companies later announced that Apple had made a $12.5 million investment in the company the previous month.[8] Apple continues to use Akamai as their primary content delivery network[9] for a wide range of applications including software downloads from Apple's Website, QuickTime movie trailers, and the iTunes Store.[10]
In September 1999 Microsoft and Akamai formed a strategic relationship to incorporate Windows Media technology in Akamai's FreeFlow service, as well as to facilitate the porting of the FreeFlow product to the Windows platform; this relationship exists to this day.[11]
Arabic news network Al-Jazeera was a customer from March 28, 2003 until April 2, 2003, when Akamai decided to end the relationship.[12] The network's English-language managing editor claimed this was due to political pressure.[13]
In June 2008, The NewsMarket teamed with Akamai to accelerate dynamic content and applications to global media ahead of the Beijing Olympics.[14]
The BBC iPlayer uses Akamai to stream its recorded and live programs, focused through an XML playlist.
The official U.S. government White House website (WhiteHouse.gov) uses Akamai Technologies for hosting video clips of President Barack Obama's Web addresses on their own in-house servers, after having posted previous addresses as embedded YouTube clips on the site.[15]
The entire China Central Television website (CCTV.com), including its streaming video, has been hosted on Akamai’s edge servers since late 2009.[16][17] Hulu uses Akamai for hosting video.[18] MIT OpenCourseWare utilizes Akamai's EdgeSuite for its content delivery network.[19]
Other customers include Facebook, Twitter, AMD, Amazon.com, Adobe Systems, Netflix, Macys, Miles Kimball, J. C. Penney, Yahoo![9] and Blizzard Entertainment.
In March 2005, Akamai signed an agreement to acquire Speedera Networks for 12 million shares of Akamai common stock, valued at $130 million at that time.[20] Both companies also agreed to halt pending lawsuits involving trade secrets and patent infringement.[21] The acquisition was completed in June 2005.[22]
In November 2006, Akamai acquired Nine Systems Corporation for roughly $164 million[23] using "approximately 2.7 million shares of their common stock, approximately $4.5 million in cash and the assumption of options to purchase approximately 400,000 shares of their common stock."[24]
On April 12, 2007 Akamai acquired Red Swoosh in exchange for 350,000 shares of Akamai common stock.[25] The acquisition of Red Swoosh was valued at approximately $15 million, net of cash acquired.
In March 2007, Akamai acquired Netli in exchange for 3.2 million shares of Akamai stock.[26] The acquisition of Netli was valued at approximately $178 million.
In late 2008, Akamai acquired Acerno, a performance-based ad network, and launched a new division, Advertising Decision Solutions.[27]
In June 2010, Akamai acquired mobile services platform company Velocitude to support its mobile devices efforts.[28]
In 2011, Akamai announced it was acquiring Israeli cloud communications competitor Cotendo for $268 million.[29]