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Akamai Technologies

American computer networking company

American computer networking company

FieldValue
nameAkamai Technologies, Inc.
logoAkamai logo.svg
logo_size200px
imageAkamai's headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.jpg
image_size250px
image_captionHeadquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts
typePublic
traded_as
founded
hq_locationCambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.
founders
key_people
industry
revenue(2024)
operating_incomeUS$533 million (2024)
net_incomeUS$505 million (2024)
assetsUS$10.4 billion (2024)
equityUS$4.88 billion (2024)
num_employees10,748 (2024)
website
footnotes
module

Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an American company specialized in content delivery network (CDN), cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and cloud services. It is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

History

The company was named after akamai, which means 'clever', or more colloquially, 'cool' in Hawaiian. Co-founder Daniel M. Lewin found the term in a Hawaiian–English dictionary after a colleague's suggestion.

Akamai Technologies entered the 1998 MIT $50K competition with a business proposition based on their research on consistent hashing and was selected as one of the finalists. By August 1998, they had developed a working prototype, and with the help of Jonathan Seelig and Randall Kaplan, they took steps to incorporate the company. Akamai Technologies was incorporated on August 20, 1998.

In late 1998 and early 1999, a group of business professionals and scientists 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 US operations for IBM. Conrades became chief executive officer of Akamai in April 1999. The company launched its commercial service in April 1999 and was listed on the NASDAQ Stock Market from October 29, 1999.

On July 1, 2001, Akamai was added to the Russell 3000 Index and Russell 2000 Index.

On September 11, 2001, co-founder Daniel M. Lewin died in the September 11 attacks at the age of 31, when he was stabbed by one of the hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center. He was seated closest to the hijackers and may have tried to stop them.

Arabic news network Al Jazeera was an Akamai customer from March 28, 2003 to April 2, 2003, when Akamai decided to end the relationship, which the network's English-language managing editor claimed was due to "political pressure".

In 2005, Paul Sagan was named chief executive officer of Akamai, taking over from Conrades. Sagan worked to differentiate Akamai from its competitors by expanding its breadth of services. Under his leadership, it grew to $1.37 billion in revenue.

In July 2007, Akamai was added to the S&P 500 index.

In 2013, co-founder Tom Leighton was elected chief executive officer, replacing Sagan.

In 2013, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged a former executive at Akamai Technologies for illegally tipping non-public information about the company's financial predicament as part of the insider trading scheme operated by now-imprisoned Galleon Management hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam. In 2014 it was reported that the National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation used Facebook's Akamai CDN to collect information on Facebook users.

On February 9, 2021, Akamai announced that it would reorganize into two internal groups Security Technology and Edge Technology. It also re-established the role of chief technology officer and named Robert Blumofe to that role. Long-time chief security officer (CSO) Andy Ellis announced he would leave in March 2021.

Akamai's headquarters are in Kendall Square. It started in Technology Square and later expanded to multiple buildings in Cambridge Center. It consolidated its offices in a purpose-built building at 145 Broadway in December 2019.

In February 2025, Akamai was chosen as the strategic cloud computing provider by one of the world's largest technology companies, with a multi-year commitment to spend over $100 million on cloud infrastructure services. The company's cloud infrastructure services primarily consist of compute and storage solutions developed based on Linode, a cloud hosting provider acquired by Akamai for $900 million in 2022.

Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform

The Akamai Intelligent Platform is a distributed cloud computing platform that operates worldwide, a network of over approximately 365,000 servers in more than 135 countries. These servers reside on roughly 1,350 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.

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 to Akamai's authoritative DNS, and an IP address is retrieved. With the IP address, the browser can then directly contact the Akamai edge server for subsequent requests. In a content delivery network (CDN) 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.

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 chosen depending on the type of content and the user's network location. The servers are located in more than 200 countries and territories. Receiving content from a server nearer to the user allows for faster downloads 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. The Download Delivery product line includes HTTP downloads for large downloadable objects, a customizable application for consumers, and analytics tools with metrics that monitor and report on the download process.

Peer-to-peer networking

In addition to using its own servers, Akamai delivers certain content from other end-users' computers, in the form of peer-to-peer networking.

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 how they interact with the Akamai Intelligent Platform. Its key components include system and development operations integration, real-time big data integration, and a single-point user interface.

Acquisitions

DateAcquisitionPaid
February 10, 2000Network24 Communicationstitle=Akamai Annual Report 2000url=https://www.akamai.com/content/dam/sdl-content/us/en/multimedia/documents/akamai/akamai-annual-report-2000.pdfpublisher=Akamai Technologies, Inc.}}
April 20, 2000InterVU Inc10.0 million shares of common stock
July 25, 2000CallTheShots, Inc.aggregate purchase price of $3.7 million
June 10, 2005Speedera Networks, Inc.title=Akamai Annual Report 2005url=https://www.akamai.com/content/dam/sdl-content/us/en/multimedia/documents/akamai/akamai-annual-report-2005.pdfpublisher=Akamai Technologies, Inc.}}
December 13, 2006Nine Systems, Inc.title=Akamai Annual Report 2006url=http://www.akamai.com/dl/investors/akamai_annual_2006.pdfpublisher=Akamai Technologies, Inc.}}
March 13, 2007Netli Inc. (Netli)aggregate purchase price of $154.4 million
April 12, 2007Red Swoosh Inctitle=Akamai Annual Report 2009url=http://www.akamai.com/dl/investors/akamai_annual_report_09.pdfpublisher=Akamai Technologies, Inc.}}
November 3, 2008aCerno Inc.aggregate purchase price of $90.8 million
June 10, 2010title=Akamai Annual Report 2010url=http://www.akamai.com/dl/investors/akamai_annual_report_10.pdfpublisher=Akamai Technologies, Inc.}}aggregate purchase price of $12 million
February 7, 2012title=Akamai Annual Report 2012url=http://www.akamai.com/dl/investors/akamai_annual_report_12.pdfpublisher=Akamai Technologies, Inc.}}aggregate purchase price of $19.3 million
March 6, 2012Cotendo, Inc.aggregate purchase price of $278.9 million
September 13, 2012FastSoft, Inc.aggregate purchase price of $14.4 million
December 4, 2012Verivue, Inc.aggregate purchase price of $30.9 million
November 8, 2013title=Akamai Annual Report 2013url=http://www.akamai.com/dl/investors/akamai-annual-report-2013.pdfpublisher=Akamai Technologies, Inc.}}aggregate purchase price of $4.3 million
February 2014cyber security provider Prolexic Technologiesaggregate purchase price of $390 million
February 2015Xerocole Inc., a domain name system technology company
April 6, 2015Octoshape, a cloud OTT IPTV service providerundisclosed amount
November 2, 2015Bloxx, a provider of Secure Web Gateway (SWG) technologyundisclosed amount
September 28, 2016Concord Systems, a provider of technology for the high performance processing of data at scaleundisclosed amount
October 4, 2016Soha Systems, an enterprise secure access delivered as a service providerundisclosed amount
December 19, 2016Cyberfend, a bot and automation detection solutions providerundisclosed amount
March 29, 2017SOASTA, a digital performance management company based in Mountain View, CAundisclosed all-cash amount
October 11, 2017Nominum, a carrier-grade DNS and DHCP provider and one of the major players in the creation of the modern DNSan undisclosed all-cash amount
January 24, 2019CIAM provider Janrain
October 2019security software provider ChameleonX$20 million
October 27, 2020IoT and mobile security provider Asavie
February 1, 2021Inverse Inc. a Montreal Canadian based security company making an open source network access controller (NAC) called PacketFence
September 29, 2021Guardicore$600 million
February 15, 2022Linode$900 million
June 25, 2024API Security vendor Noname Security$450 million

Key scientific publications

These papers in scientific conferences and journals describe Akamai's technology in greater detail:

References

References

  1. (March 18, 2021). "Akamai Announces Board Of Directors Changes".
  2. (February 24, 2025). "Akamai Technologies, Inc. 2024 Form 10-K Annual Report". [[U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission]].
  3. (February 20, 2025). "Form 8-K". [[U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission]].
  4. "Globally Distributed Content Delivery, IEEE Internet Computing, September/October 2002, pp. 50–58".
  5. Hendy, Nina. (March 3, 2020). "How to avoid falling victim to a cyber attack".
  6. (March 17, 2020). "Akamai Stock Finds Support On Video Streaming Surge {{!}} Investor's Business Daily". Investor's Business Daily.
  7. (2014-04-28). "How these nine Mass. tech companies got their names".
  8. Bruce Maggs and [[Ramesh Sitaraman]]. (2015). "Algorithmic nuggets in content delivery". ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review.
  9. (May 13, 1998). "Two teams win top prize in MIT $50K contest". MIT News.
  10. "Akamai Technologies Inc". Reuters.
  11. "Company History".
  12. "Akamai Technologies, Inc. History". fundinguniverse.com.
  13. "Conrades to resign from Akamai". Boston Business Journal.
  14. "AKAMAI TECHNOLOGIES INC (AKAM) IPO". NASDAQ.
  15. (July 17, 2001). "Akamai Technologies, Inc. Added to the Russell 3000 Index and Russell 2000 Index".
  16. Leopold, Todd. (September 11, 2013). "The legacy of Danny Lewin, the first victims of 9/11". CNN.
  17. "Akamai ends Al Jazeera server support". news.cnet.com.
  18. (April 8, 2003). "Al Jazeera Denied Akamai Services". Tech.mit.edu.
  19. (April 26, 2012). "Akamai Says CEO Sagan to Leave; Profit Less Than Estimates". Bloomberg.
  20. "Akamai Technologies, Inc. (AKAM) Income Statement". Yahoo! Finance.
  21. (July 10, 2007). "Akamai Names Leighton CEO After Eight-Month Search". DataCenterKnowledge.
  22. (December 17, 2012). "Akamai Names Leighton CEO After Eight-Month Search". BloombergBusinessweek.
  23. (September 20, 2013). "SEC Charges Former Technology Company Executive for Role in Rajaratnam Insider Trading Scheme". VentureBeat.
  24. Harrison Weber. (May 15, 2014). "Facebook & Akamai respond to NSA slides alleging massive CDN vulnerability". VentureBeat.
  25. Gagliordi, Natalie. (9 February 2021). "Akamai tops Q4 expectations, announces reorganization and new CTO". ZDNet.
  26. "Thread : Andy Ellis on Twitter...".
  27. (November 2019). "Akamai Opens New HQ In Cambridge".
  28. "Akamai selected as strategic cloud computing provider by one of the world’s largest technology companies, with a multi-year commitment to spend over $100M on cloud infrastructure services".
  29. (2025-02-25). "Akamai Secures $100M Cloud Contract with Major Tech Company".
  30. Lardinois, Frederic. (2022-02-15). "Akamai acquires Linode for $900M".
  31. "The Akamai Network: A Platform for High-Performance Internet Applications".
  32. "Facts & Figures".
  33. (Aug 2020). "Akamai DNS: Providing Authoritative Answers to the World's Queries, ACM SIGCOMM conference".
  34. Zakas, Nicholas C.. (November 29, 2011). "How content delivery networks (CDNs) work".
  35. (Aug 2015). "End-User Mapping: Next Generation Request Routing for Content Delivery". ACM SIGCOMM conference.
  36. (June 6, 2022). "Countries in which Akamai maintains Server Points of Presence".
  37. (August 19, 2011). "Inside Akamai and the scary future of streaming video".
  38. (January 26, 2018). "Download Delivery". Akamai Technologies.
  39. Ben Homer. (January 26, 2010). "Akamai Using P2P for Enhanced Video Delivery". Online Video Watch.
  40. "Akamai NetSession Interface – Design Principles". Akamai Technologies.
  41. (October 9, 2013). "Akamai Unveils Open Platform Initiative at Akamai Edge 2013 Customer Conference". Yahoo! Finance.
  42. (January 18, 2000). "Akamai to Acquire Network24 Communications". StreamingMedia.com.
  43. "Akamai Annual Report 2000". Akamai Technologies, Inc..
  44. Richtymyer, Richard. (February 7, 2000). "Akamai buys InterVu". CNN Money.
  45. "Akamai Annual Report 2005". Akamai Technologies, Inc..
  46. Kawamoto, Dawn. (November 20, 2006). "Akamai to buy Nine Systems". CNET News.
  47. "Akamai Annual Report 2006". Akamai Technologies, Inc..
  48. Gross, Grant. (February 5, 2007). "Akamai to acquire Netli for about $170 million". NetworkWorld.
  49. Arrington, Michael. (April 12, 2007). "Payday for Red Swoosh: $15 million from Akamai". Tech Crunch.
  50. "Akamai Annual Report 2009". Akamai Technologies, Inc..
  51. Kaplan, David. (October 21, 2008). "Branching Out, Akamai Acquires Ad Targeter Acerno For $95 Million". Tech Crunch.
  52. "Akamai Annual Report 2010". Akamai Technologies, Inc..
  53. Boutin, Paul. (June 10, 2010). "Akamai acquires mobile services company Velocitude". VentureBeat.
  54. "Akamai Annual Report 2012". Akamai Technologies, Inc..
  55. Huang, Gregory T.. (February 8, 2012). "Akamai Buys Blaze as Web Optimization Heats Up in Boston". Xconomy.
  56. Wauters, Robin. (December 22, 2011). "Done Deal – Akamai Buys Rival Cotendo For $268 Million". Tech Crunch.
  57. McCarthy, Maureen. (September 14, 2012). "Akamai Technologies snaps up FastSoft". Boston Business Journal.
  58. Whittaker, Zack. (November 13, 2012). "Akamai expands digital content delivery network, acquires Verivue". ZDNet.
  59. "Akamai Annual Report 2013". Akamai Technologies, Inc..
  60. Dignan, Larry. (November 11, 2013). "Akamai buys Velocious Networks". ZDNet.
  61. Lunden, Ingrid. (December 2, 2013). "Akamai Buys DDoS Prevention Specialist Prolexic For $370M To Ramp Up Security Offerings For Enterprises". TechCrunch.
  62. Castellanos, Sara. (March 2, 2015). "Akamai Technologies acquires Colorado domain name system tech firm Xerocole".
  63. "Media Delivery Solutions for Streaming Video and Software Delivery - Akamai".
  64. "Akamai Acquires Octoshape to Optimize Streaming Video - 040615 - Akamai".
  65. "Bloxx - Real Time Web & Email Filtering".
  66. "Akamai Acquires Bloxx for Cloud Security - Akamai".
  67. "Concord: Concord.io".
  68. "Akamai Acquires Data Processing Provider Concord Systems - Akamai".
  69. "Secure Application Access - Akamai".
  70. "Akamai Acquires Soha Systems for Secure Remote Access to Enterprise Applications - Akamai".
  71. "Bot Manager - Akamai".
  72. "Akamai Acquires Cyberfend".
  73. (March 29, 2017). "Akamai agrees to acquire SOASTA". Reuters.
  74. (October 11, 2017). "Akamai agrees to acquire Nominum". Reuters.
  75. "Akamai Completes Acquisition Of Customer Identity Access Management Company Janrain Inc.".
  76. "Akamai Technologies Announces Acquisition Of ChameleonX - Quick Facts {{!}} Markets Insider". Insider Inc. and finanzen.net GmbH (Imprint).
  77. "Akamai Technologies Announces Acquisition Of ChameleonX - Quick Facts". Nasdaq, Inc.
  78. "Akamai Technologies Advances 5G Security Strategy With Acquisition Of Asavie".
  79. "Akamai Technologies Acquires Inverse Inc., Adds To Zero Trust Security Platform".
  80. Mirchevska, Sara. (2021-10-04). "Akamai Technologies Acquires Guardicore in A$600 Million Worth Deal". HostAdvice.
  81. (2022-02-15). "Akamai To Acquire Linode to Provide Businesses with a Developer-friendly and Massively-distributed Platform to Build, Run and Secure Next Generation Applications". Akamai.
  82. (2024-05-07). "Akamai to Acquire API Protection Startup Noname Security for $450 Million".
  83. (2024-06-27). "Akamai doubles down on API security with Noname acquisition".
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