The fall and rise of Akamai

Priya Padmanabhan

Bangalore: The ever-increasing traffic on the Internet has managed to send the cash registers ringing for Akamai Technologies.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company's content delivery solutions today power the world's most popular sites. It has been a dramatic turnaround for a company, which was a dotcom darling in its heydays opened with a $234 million IPO before it plummeted during the economic meltdown of 2001.

The company has, however, picked itself up and its transformation into a successful company is complete now, with its inclusion into the ivy-league of NASDAQ top 100 companies. Its revenues for fiscal '05 climbed to $283 million, a 35 per cent jump from $210 million, the revenue it posted in 2004.

Akamai came to India last year to start its Bangalore center after integrating operations of Speedera Networks', which it bought out. From a 55-membered team last year, the company is poised to touch a headcount of 135 employees in Bangalore by the year-end. The company is investing Rs 15 crore in a new facility in the city.

The increasing popularity and pervasiveness of digital media in the form of digital audio files, webcasts and streaming video has been a major growth driver for the company. From managing speedy content delivery, the company has also made forays into the area of application performance.

“There are problems, complexities and a lot of confusion on the Net. We are trying to enable online applications to scale using our distributed networks,” said Sanjay Singh, who heads Akamai's India center. He added that the company wanted to move a step ahead and offer application acceleration in the TCP-IP/ network layer in a year or two.

Akamai also offers analytical services, which provides insights to customers on user behavior and analysis. Besides, this, Akamai provides consulting services on optimizing applications, search and indexing.

Akamai's clientele includes Apple iTunes, Fox Sports, MSNBC, Logitech, Fujitsu and Cathay Pacific. Indian customers include Times of India, Sify, Rediff and NDTV.

The company is targeting media and entertainment segment, online-retail, hi-tech companies and the travel sector in India. However, Singh said that poor broadband penetration and the lackluster Indian e-commerce segment have prevented the growth of the market.

However, Singh is optimistic that mobile technology would drive e-commerce in the country. “Downloading of songs and multimedia content onto the mobile phone is the first step to the growth of e-commerce,” he said.

The activities of Akamai's Bangalore center span all major functions such as network operations, internal administrative processes, tech support and engineering. Rather than attributing any cost advantages of the Indian operations to the company, Singh said that the company has introduced some new functions such as pre-sales research in Bangalore.

“These have enabled the company to implement and execute more projects, optimize tasks and expedited delivery mechanisms,” he added.

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