The story
Founded by Daniel Lewin, F. Thomson Leighton and Randall Kaplan in 1998.1
The company was named after the Hawaiian word akamai, which translates to "clever" or "cool". 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 (equivalent to $100K in 2025) with a business proposition based on their research regarding consistent hashing and was selected as a finalist. By August 1998, the team had developed a working prototype. Jonathan Seelig and Randall Kaplan joined F. Thomson Leighton and Daniel Lewin as founders, and 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. These included, 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 starting 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.
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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.
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.
From Wikipedia’s article on Akamai Technologies, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.6