Akamai Technologies

Akamai Technologies, Inc.

Type	Public
Traded as	NASDAQ: AKAM NASDAQ-100 Component S&P 500 Component
Founded	1998
Headquarters	150 Broadway Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 USA
Founder(s)	Tom Leighton Daniel M. Lewin Randall Kaplan Preetish Nijhawan Jonathan Seelig [1]
Key people	George H. Conrades (Chairman) Tom Leighton (Co-founder, Chief Scientist, CEO)[2]
Industry	Internet
Revenue	US$ 1,577.922 million (2013)[3] US$ 1,373.947 million (2012)[3]
Operating income	US$ 413.968 million (2013)[3] US$ 314.487 million (2012)[3]
Net income	US$ 293.487 million (2013)[3] US$ 203.989 million (2012)[3]
Total assets	US$ 2,957.685 million (2013)[4] US$ 2,600.627 million (2012)[3]
Total equity	US$ 2,629.431 million (2013)[4] US$ 2,345.754 million (2012)[3]
Employees	5000 (November 2014)[5]
Website	akamai.com
Alexa rank	100 (Dec 2014)[6]
Type of site	E-commerce

Akamai Technologies, Inc. is a cloud services provider headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. Akamai's content delivery network is one of the world's largest distributed computing platforms.^[7] The company operates a network of servers around the world and rents capacity on these servers to customers who want their websites to work faster by distributing content from locations close to the user. Over the years their customers have included Apple, Facebook, Bing, Twitter and healthcare.gov. When a user navigates to the URL of an Akamai customer, their browser is redirected to one of Akamai’s copies of this website, almost entirely invisible to the vast majority of its users.

As of 2009, secure connections (designed to highlight hidden intermediaries) pose a problem to Akamai, and attempts to connect to a popular website over HTTPS may reveal the Akamai backend.^[8] More recently, however, enhanced security offerings such as Kona Site Defender (Web Application Firewall) have become a major selling point, and in 2013 were the leading driver of revenue growth for the company.^[9]

The company was founded in 1998 by Daniel M. Lewin (then a graduate student at MIT) and MIT applied mathematics professor Tom Leighton, together with Jonathan Seelig, Preetish Nijhawan and Randall Kaplan.^[1] Lewin was killed aboard American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed in the September 11 attacks of 2001. Leighton currently serves as Akamai's CEO. Akamai is a Hawaiian word meaning “intelligent” or “witty”.

History

Accepting a challenge posed by Dr. Tim Berners-Lee, Dr. Tom Leighton, a professor of applied mathematics, began working with his colleagues to create a better way to deliver content over the Internet. Co-Founder Daniel M. Lewin, a graduate student of Leighton’s, devised key algorithms that would become an essential part of improving content delivery.^[10]

In 1997, Leighton and Lewin entered the annual MIT $50K competition with a business proposition based on their research, and their proposal was selected as one of the finalists.^[11] By August 1998 they had developed a working prototype, and with the help of Jonathan Seelig, Preetish Nijhawan, and Randall Kaplan, they began taking steps to incorporate the company.^[12]

In late 1998 and early 1999, a group of business professionals joined the founding team. Most notably, Paul Sagan, former president of New Media for Time Inc. and George Conrades, former chairman and chief executive officer of BBN Corp. and senior vice president of U.S. operations for IBM. Conrades became chief executive officer of Akamai in April 1999 and led the company to from start-up to sustained profitability and free cash flow before turning the reins over to Sagan in 2005.^[10][13][14] The company launched commercial service in April 1999 and was added to the NASDAQ Stock Market on October 29, 1999.^[15]

Effective July 1, 2001, Akamai was added to the Russell 3000 Index and Russell 2000 Index.^[16]

In 2001, co-founder Daniel M. Lewin died in the September 11th attacks at the age of 31. Lewin was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center.^[17]

In 2005, Paul Sagan was named chief executive officer of Akamai. Sagan worked to differentiate Akamai from its competitors by expanding the company's breadth of services.^[14] Under his leadership the company grew to $1.37 billion in revenues.^[18] Sagan served as chief executive officer until co-founder and current CEO, Tom Leighton, was elected to the position in 2013.^[19]

Technology

Akamai Intelligent Platform

The Akamai Intelligent Platform is a distributed cloud computing platform that operates worldwide. It is a network of over 170,000 servers^[20] deployed in more than 100^[20] countries. These servers reside in more than 1,300^[20] of the world's networks gathering real time information about traffic, congestion, and trouble spots. Each Akamai server is equipped with proprietary software that uses complex algorithms to process requests from nearby users, and then serve the requested content.^[21]

Content delivery process

The content delivery process begins with a user submitting a request to a browser. When a user enters a URL, a DNS request is triggered and an IP address is retrieved. With the IP address, the browser can then contact a web server directly for subsequent requests.^[22] In a content delivery network structure, the domain name of the URL is translated by the mapping system into the IP address of an edge server to serve the content to the user.^[21]

Akamai delivers web content over its Intelligent Platform by transparently mirroring elements such as HTML, CSS, software downloads, and media objects from customers’ servers. The Akamai server is automatically picked depending on the type of content and the user's network location. Receiving content from an Akamai server close to the user allows for faster download-times and less vulnerability to network congestion. Akamai claims to provide better scalability by delivering the content over the last-mile from servers close to end-users, avoiding the middle-mile bottleneck of the Internet.^[23]

Peer-to-peer networking

In addition to using Akamai's own servers, Akamai delivers content from other end-users' computers, in a form of peer-to-peer networking.^[24][25] When users request a download of some large files served by this system, it prompts them to download and install “Akamai NetSession Interface,” a download manager used to reduce download time and to increase quality.^[26] However, this software operates not merely as a download manager (delivering content from the Internet to the user's computer) but also as a peer-to-peer server, delivering content cached on the user's computer to other users' computers.

Network Operations Command Center

Akamai’s Network Operations Command Center (NOCC) is used for proactive monitoring and troubleshooting of all servers in the global Akamai network.^[27] The NOCC provides real time statistics of Akamai’s web traffic. The traffic metrics update automatically and provide a view of the Internet traffic conditions on Akamai’s servers and customer websites.^[28]

State of the Internet

The State of the Internet report is a quarterly report Akamai releases based on data gathered from its Intelligent Platform. The report provides global Internet statistics such as connection speed, broadband adoption, attack traffic, network connectivity, and mobile connectivity.^[29][30]

Visualizing the Internet

Akamai’s data visualization tools display how data is moving across the Internet in real-time. Viewers are able to see global web conditions, malicious attack traffic, and Internet connectivity.^[31] In addition, the net usage indices monitor global news consumption, industry specific traffic, and mobile trends.^[32] Akamai also offers the Internet Visualization application, which allows users to view real-time data their mobile device.^[33]

OPEN Initiative

On October 9, 2013 Akamai announced its Open Initiative at the 2013 Akamai Edge Conference. OPEN allows customers and partners to develop and customize the way they interact with the Akamai Intelligent Platform. Key components of OPEN include system and development operations integration, real-time big data integration, and a single-point user interface.^[34]

Privacy policy

The Akamai Privacy Policy^[35] states that Akamai is involved in the "collection, use or disclosure of personally identifiable information", including IP addresses. The policy also states "Akamai may store data automatically in order to transmit it efficiently. The data may be stored briefly or for a longer period of time, as determined by the technical requirements Akamai develops through working with our business customers." As such, accessing a website hosted on Akamai servers may result in tracking.

Primary domains

Akamai Technologies owns about 60 other domains, but the primary domains it uses include:

Corporate

• akamai.com – Akamai's corporate domain

Content-delivery networks and domains

• akamai.net
• akamaiedge.net
• akamaized.net
• akamaihd.net, a content-delivery network used by companies like Twitter and Facebook to speed up their services
• edgesuite.net
• edgekey.net
• srip.net^[36][37]
• akamaitechnologies.com, a content-delivery network used by companies like Adobe
• akamaitechnologies.fr

DNS servers

• akamaitech.net
• akadns.net
• akam.net
• akamaistream.net

Customers

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.^[38] Both companies later announced that Apple had made a $12.5 million investment in the company the previous month.^[39] Apple continues to use Akamai as their primary content delivery network^[40] for a wide range of applications including software downloads from Apple's Website, QuickTime movie trailers, and the iTunes Store.^[41]

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.^[42]

Arabic news network Al-Jazeera was a customer from March 28, 2003, until April 2, 2003, when Akamai decided to end the relationship.^[43] The network's English-language managing editor claimed this was due to political pressure.^[44]

In June 2008, The NewsMarket teamed with Akamai to accelerate dynamic content and applications to global media ahead of the Beijing Olympics.^[45]

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.^[46]

The entire China Central Television website (CCTV.com), including its streaming video, has been hosted on Akamai's edge servers since late 2009.^[47][48] Hulu uses Akamai for hosting video.^[49] MIT OpenCourseWare utilizes Akamai's EdgeSuite for its content delivery network.^[50]

Trend Micro uses Akamai for their Housecall antivirus application.

Akamai provided streaming services to ESPN Star (India) during the course of the ICC Cricket World Cup 2011.^[51]

Rackspace's Cloud Files use Akamai's Content Delivery Network (CDN) for storing its customer's files.

Other customers include Adobe Systems, Airbnb, AMD, AutoTrader.com, ESPN, Hewlett-Packard, Hilton Worldwide, IBM, J. C. Penney, MTV Networks, NASA, National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, NBC Sports, Pearson Education, Red Bull GmbH, Red Hat, Yahoo!.^[52]

Akamai competes with CloudFlare, LimeLight, MaxCDN, Microsoft Azure, and EdgeCast Networks.^[53]

Acquisitions

• On Feb. 10, 2000, Akamai acquired Network24 Communications^[54] for an aggregate purchase price of $203,600,000.^[55]

• On Apr. 20, 2000,^[55] Akamai acquired InterVU Inc.^[56] for an aggregate purchase price of $2,800,000,000.

• In July. 25, 2000, Akamai acquired CallTheShots, Inc., for an aggregate purchase price of $3,700,000.^[55]

• On June 10, 2005, Akamai acquired Speedera Networks, Inc. for an aggregate purchase price of $142,200,000.^[57]

• In Dec. 13, 2006, Akamai acquired Nine Systems, Inc.,^[58] for an aggregate purchase price of $157,500,000.^[59]

• On Mar. 13, 2007, Akamai acquired Netli Inc. (Netli),^[60] for an aggregate purchase price of $154,400,000.

• On Apr. 12, 2007, Akamai acquired Red Swoosh Inc.^[61] for an aggregate purchase price of $18,700,000.^[62]

• On Nov. 3, 2008, Akamai acquired aCerno Inc.,^[62] for an aggregate purchase price of $90,800,000.^[63]

• On June 10, 2010, Akamai acquired Velocitude LLC,^[64] for an aggregate purchase price of $12,000,000.^[65]
• On Feb. 7, 2012, Akamai acquired Blaze Software, Inc.,^[66] for an aggregate purchase price of $19,300,000.^[67]
• On Mar. 6, 2012, Akamai acquired Cotendo, Inc.,^[66] for an aggregate purchase price of $278,900,000.^[68]

• On Sept. 13, 2012, Akamai acquired FastSoft, Inc.,^[66] for an aggregate purchase price of $14,400,000.^[69]

• On Dec. 4, 2012, Akamai acquired Verivue, Inc.,^[66] for an aggregate purchase price of $30,900,000.^[70]

• On Nov. 8, 2013, Akamai acquired Velocius Networks^[71] for an aggregate purchase price of $4,300,000.^[72]
• In February 2014, Akamai acquired cyber security provider, Prolexic Technologies^[71] for an aggregate purchase price of $390,000,000.^[73]

• In February, 2015, Akamai acquired Xerocole Inc., a domain name system technology company.^[74]

• On Apr. 6, 2015, Akamai acquired cloud OTT IPTV service provider Octoshape,^[75] for an undisclosed amount.^[76]

See also

• Content delivery network
• Memcached
• Paul Sagan
• Daniel M. Lewin
• Tom Leighton

Notes

References

• Erik Nygren, Ramesh K. Sitaraman, and Jennifer Sun. The Akamai Network: A Platform for High-Performance Internet Applications, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Vol. 44, No.3, July 2010.

External links

• Official website
• Traffic Cops Of The Net (BusinessWeek article)
• Akamai: In the Broadband Internet Sweet Spot (article)
• The Motley Fool's analysis of Akamai
• The Akamai Story: From Theory to Practice
• Yahoo! Finance "Akamai Technologies, Inc." Company Profile
• Washington Post profile of the company
• Akamai & The CDN Price Wars
• Globally Distributed Content Delivery

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