Akamai riding high on Internet

Ravi Maira
Vice-President, Web Experence,
Products, Akamai Technologies

If you have ever shopped online, downloaded music, watched a web video or connected to work remotely, you have probably used Akamai in some way or the other. Ravi Maira, Vice-President, Web Experience Products, Akamai Technologies, explains how every individual going online touches Akamai without their knowledge, in some way or the other 

Akamai Technologies is a company that was formed to provide performance, Cloud Management Security and media services to customers. “Our customers are web sites that make money. We ensure cost efficiency to them through cost-efficient scaling, reliability, protection by which they can make more money,” explains Ravi Maira. Most of the large web sites of the world use Akamai that include top e-commerce clients, media companies, top newspaper companies.

The Founding of Akamai

A company founded out of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), it has been around since 1998. Though it was not founded with an intention to set up as a company, it did emerge to be one after prior talks yielded fruitful results. From what seemed a conversation to solve congestion on internet between Tim Burners Lee, the founder of Internet and a Professor in MIT, and Akamai’s Co-Founder Tom Leighton, also a Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT, came up with a solution that formed the basis for Akamai. Dr Leighton subsequently recognized how a solution to Web congestion could be found in applied mathematics and algorithms and went on to prove this and published it in a book later. Along with Dr Leighton, a graduate student Danny Lewin, who became the other co-founder of Akamai, participated in the esteemed annual MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition with the sole objective to win the prize money. 

However, they did not win even after reaching the final round, but attracted investor interests. They took the money generated and set up the present company of Akamai Technologies with Yahoo! being their first-ever customer. Ever since then Akamai has been contributing to make better use of the Internet by its clients. 

Akamai helps enterprises accelerate innovation in the hyper connected world by removing the complexities of technology ensuring one focus on driving one’s business faster forward. It enables enterprises to capitalize on market opportunities presented by trends like mobile and cloud while overcoming the challenges presented by security threats and the need to reach users globally.

Akamai has used the cloud since before people started using that term. “We have our own platform and have thousands of servers deployed on the internet. Known as Akamai Intelligent platform, it is the most widely distributed platform in the world. We do not own any fibre or cable, but we deploy in our customers’ data centers, and this usually ends up saving money for them and giving better performance to their end-users. Our presence in 83 countries, 900 cities further helps us to be close to all the Internet users,” he opines. 

India market for Akamai

Akamai has been in India since 2005 and growing ever since. “We are here for the market opportunity as it is a growing market. We are also here for the talent that we find in great amount. As a matter of fact, we have the second-largest office of Akamai in Bangalore, the first one being in Cambridge,” says Ravi.

India is one of the fastest-growing markets for Akamai globally with customers that include a mix of eCommerce, financial services, manufacturing and media & entertainment. The key customers include NDTV, Naukri.com, Rediff, Sify, The Times of India and The Hindustan Times, HolidayIQ.com, Snapdeal.com, redbus.com, dealsandyou.com, fashionandyou.com, IndiaInfoline.com, BSE. Akamai has crossed 120 customers in India. 

Akamai’s GTM strategy is a combination of sales and marketing engine that covers many different activities like Lead generation, Cold Calling, Branding and lots of reference selling. “All our customers who are using us or will be using us are important. We have a model that is both direct and indirect. In some regions, we only go through partners while in some we have a mix. The type of partners can vary from bigger solution partners like IBM, System Integrators like Accenture and local Partners. We also help our customers access to Akamai services through our cloud platform,” Ravi shares. 

Their dream is to become a $5-billion company by 2020. And the only way to do is to increase the channel business. 

But bandwidth shortage still faces India. The number of Internet users is going to increase between 330 million and 370 million by 2015. But the rise has not been satisfactory as the access to high-speed internet still remains limited, the reason being the challenges thrown in by poor bandwidth. “Infrastructure no doubt is growing in the market giving more people more connectivity. It is opportunity for us and also for customers. They are more likely to use the Internet platform for richer interactive experiences. But they have to have broadband to make that experience fast and rich. So unless the bandwidth issue is fixed, the situation is going to remain grim,” he sums up. 

samrita@varindia.com