Akamai Technologies

Overview

Akamai Technologies, Inc.

type	Public
traded as	nasdaq: AKAM S&P 500 component
founded	1998
hq location	Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.
founders	Daniel Lewin F. Thomson Leighton Randall Kaplan Preetish Nijhawan Jonathan Seelig Bruce Maggs
key people	F. Thomson Leighton (CEO) Daniel Hesse (chairman)‡R1R‡
industry	Internet Cloud computing
revenue	US$4.21 billion (2025)
operating income	US$567 million (2025)
net income	US$452 million (2025)
assets	US$11.5 billion (2025)
equity	US$4.98 billion (2025)
num employees	11,000 (2025)
website	akamai.com
footnotes	‡R2R‡‡R3R‡

Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an American company specializing in content delivery network[4] (CDN), cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and cloud services.[5][6] 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.[7]

Akamai Technologies entered the 1998 MIT $50K competition (equivalent to $K in ) with a business proposition based on their research on

Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform

The Akamai Intelligent Platform[30] is a distributed cloud computing platform that operates worldwide, a network of over approximately 365,000 servers in more than 135 countries.[31] These servers reside on roughly 1,350 of the world's networks, gathering real-time information about traffic, congestion, and trouble spots.[31] Each Akamai server is equipped with proprietary software that uses complex algorithms to process requests from nearby users.[30]

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,[32] and an IP address is retrieved. With the IP address, the browser can then directly contact the Akamai edge server for subsequent requests.[33] In a content delivery network (CDN) structure, the domain name of the URL is translated by the mapping system[34] into the IP address of an edge server to serve the content to the user.[30]

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.[35] 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.[36] 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.[37]

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.[40]

Akamai Technologies

History

Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform

Content delivery process

Peer-to-peer networking

OPEN Initiative

Acquisitions

Key scientific publications

See also

External links

References