Akamai Technologies, Inc. (icon; ) is an Internet content delivery network

Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network or content distribution network is a system of computers containing copies of data placed at various nodes of a network....

 headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...

, US.

The company was founded in 1998 by then-MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

 graduate student Daniel M. Lewin, and MIT Applied Mathematics professor Tom Leighton

F. Thomson Leighton

Frank Thomson "Tom" Leighton is a professor of Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has served as the head of the Algorithms group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory since 1996, and co-founded Akamai Technologies with student Daniel...

. Lewin was killed aboard American Airlines flight 11

American Airlines Flight 11

American Airlines Flight 11 was American Airlines' daily scheduled morning transcontinental flight from Logan International Airport, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Los Angeles International Airport, in Los Angeles, California...

 which crashed in the September 11 attacks of 2001.

Leighton still serves as Akamai's Chief Scientist.

Akamai is a Hawaiian

Hawaiian language

The Hawaiian language is a Polynesian language that takes its name from Hawaii, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the state of Hawaii...

 word meaning smart or intelligent with connotations of insightful or wise or skillful.

History

Leighton has served as head of the Algorithms Group at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science since its inception in 1996. Leighton believed that a solution to Web congestion could be found in applied mathematics and algorithms. He solicited the help of graduate student Danny Lewin and several others. Together they developed the mathematical algorithms necessary to handle the dynamic routing of content and work towards this aim.

In late 1998 and early 1999, a group of Internet business professionals joined the founding team. Most notably, Paul Sagan who was a former President of Time Inc. New Media, a founder of Road Runner cable modem service and who helped launch NY 1 News, became chief operating officer and eventually president of Akamai Technologies. George Conrades, former chairman and chief executive officer of BBN Corp. and senior vice president of U.S. Operations for IBM, joined as chief executive officer a few months later. The company launched commercial service in April 1999.

Between 2003 and 2009, Akamai’s "revenue grew at a compounded annual growth rate of more than 32%, with a 26% operating margin in 2009. Akamai also broadened its worldwide customer base, with 28% of 2009 revenue coming from outside the United States, up from 23% two years earlier." Part of this growth came from Akamai’s core content delivery service.

Content delivery to a user

Akamai provides a service to companies that have content on the Internet (Akamai's customers), to more efficiently deliver this content to users browsing the Web and downloading content. Akamai does this by transparently mirror

Mirror (computing)

In computing, a mirror is an exact copy of a data set. On the Internet, a mirror site is an exact copy of another Internet site.Mirror sites are most commonly used to provide multiple sources of the same information, and are of particular value as a way of providing reliable access to large downloads...

ing content—sometimes all site content including HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

, CSS

CSS

-Computing:*Cascading Style Sheets, a language used to describe the style of document presentations in web development*Central Structure Store in the PHIGS 3D API*Closed source software, software that is not distributed with source code...

, and software downloads, and sometimes just media

Digital media

Digital media is a form of electronic media where data is stored in digital form. It can refer to the technical aspect of storage and transmission Digital media is a form of electronic media where data is stored in digital (as opposed to analog) form. It can refer to the technical aspect of...

 objects such as audio

Sound

Sound is a mechanical wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations.-Propagation of...

, graphics

Image

An image is an artifact, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject—usually a physical object or a person.-Characteristics:...

, animation, and video—from customer server

Server (computing)

In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...

s. Though the domain name

Domain name

A domain name is an identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet. Domain names are formed by the rules and procedures of the Domain Name System ....

 (but not subdomain

Subdomain

In the Domain Name System hierarchy, a subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain.- Overview :The Domain Name System has a tree structure or hierarchy, with each node on the tree being a domain name. A subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain, the only domain that is not...

) is the same, the IP address

IP address

An Internet Protocol address is a numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing...

 points to an Akamai server or another user's machine that Akamai is using as a server rather than the customer's server. The Akamai server is automatically picked depending on the type of content and the user's network location.

The benefit is that users can receive content from whichever Akamai server or user is close to them or has a good connection, leading to faster download times and less vulnerability to network congestion or outages.

In addition to content caching, Akamai provides services which accelerate dynamic and personalized content, J2EE

Java Platform, Enterprise Edition

Java Platform, Enterprise Edition or Java EE is widely used platform for server programming in the Java programming language. The Java platform differs from the Java Standard Edition Platform in that it adds libraries which provide functionality to deploy fault-tolerant, distributed, multi-tier...

-compliant applications, and streaming media to the extent that such services frame a localized perspective.

Primary domains

Akamai Technologies owns about 60 other domains, but the primary domains it uses are:

• akamai.com - Akamai's corporate domain
• akamai.net & akamaiedge.net - Akamai's content delivery domain
• akamaitech.net, akadns.net & akam.net - Akamai's DNS
  Domain name system
  The Domain Name System is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities...
  
   servers
• static.ak.fbcdn.net - Akamai's part of Facebook content distribution network

Peer-to-peer networking

In addition to using Akamai's own servers, Akamai delivers content from other end-users' computers, in a form of peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...

 networking When users request a download of some large files served by this system, they are prompted to download and install "Akamai NetSession Interface, a download manager used to reduce download time and increase quality." However, this software is not just a download manager, delivering content from the Internet to the user's computer, but it also a peer-to-peer server, delivering content cached on the user's computer to other users' computers. The user agreement describes this vaguely as

"You agree that the Software may send and receive commands and data related to participating publishers’ digital information ("Published Content") to and from the Akamai network and other Akamai NetSession Interfaces to facilitate the downloading of Published Content."

The Akamai web site describes this system as follows:

"All clients are always on - available to send data when your system is idle. This means there is massive redundancy of peer caches on the network and with such redundancy in resources, the network can be selective about which idle resources to pull from."

The Akamai network: EdgePlatform

Akamai claims it operates a distributed computed platform called EdgePlatform made of a growing number of networked servers, located in many PoPs (points of presence) in various countries around the world, in several networks: 95,000 servers in 1,900 networks across 71 countries, in August 2011.

Customers

On July 21, 1999, at Macworld Expo

Macworld Conference & Expo

Produced by Boston-based IDG World Expo, Macworld | iWorld is a trade-show with conference tracks dedicated to the Apple Macintosh platform. It is held annually in the United States, usually during the second week of January...

 New York, Apple and Akamai announced a strategic partnership to build Apple's new media network, QuickTime

QuickTime

QuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...

 TV (QTV), based on QuickTime Streaming Server

QuickTime Streaming Server

QuickTime Streaming Server is a server or service daemon that was built into Apple's Mac OS X Server until OS X Server 10.7. It delivers video and audio on request to users over a computer network, including the Internet. Its primary GUI configuration tool is QTSS Publisher and its web-based...

. Both companies later announced that Apple had made a $12.5 million investment in the company the previous month. Apple continues to use Akamai as their primary content delivery network for a wide range of applications including software downloads from Apple's Website, QuickTime movie trailers, and the iTunes Store

ITunes Store

The iTunes Store is a software-based online digital media store operated by Apple. Opening as the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003, with over 200,000 items to purchase, it is, as of April 2008, the number-one music vendor in the United States...

.

In September 1999 Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 and Akamai formed a strategic relationship to incorporate Windows Media

Windows Media

Windows Media is a multimedia framework for media creation and distribution for Microsoft Windows. It consists of a software development kit with several application programming interfaces and a number of prebuilt technologies, and is the replacement of NetShow technologies.The Windows Media SDK...

 technology in Akamai's FreeFlow service, as well as to facilitate the porting

Porting

In computer science, porting is the process of adapting software so that an executable program can be created for a computing environment that is different from the one for which it was originally designed...

 of the FreeFlow product to the Windows platform; this relationship exists to this day.

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

In June 2008, The NewsMarket teamed with Akamai to accelerate dynamic content and applications to global media ahead of the Beijing Olympics.

The BBC iPlayer

BBC iPlayer

BBC iPlayer, commonly shortened to iPlayer, is an internet television and radio service, developed by the BBC to extend its former RealPlayer-based and other streamed video clip content to include whole TV shows....

 uses Akamai to stream its recorded and live programs, focused through an XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

 playlist

Playlist

In its most general form, a playlist is simply a list of songs. They can be played in sequential or shuffled order. The term has several specialized meanings in the realms of radio broadcasting and personal computers.-In radio:...

.

The official U.S. government White House

White House

The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...

 website (WhiteHouse.gov) uses Akamai Technologies for hosting video clips of President Barack Obama

Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...

's Web addresses on their own in-house servers, after having posted previous addresses as embedded YouTube clips on the site.

The entire China Central Television

China Central Television

China Central Television or Chinese Central Television, commonly abbreviated as CCTV, is the major state television broadcaster in mainland China. CCTV has a network of 19 channels broadcasting different programmes and is accessible to more than one billion viewers...

 website (CCTV.com), including its streaming video, has been hosted on Akamai’s edge servers since late 2009. Hulu

Hulu

Hulu is a website and over-the-top subscription service offering ad-supported on-demand streaming video of TV shows, movies, webisodes and other new media, trailers, clips, and behind-the-scenes footage from NBC, Fox, ABC, and Obstacle on October 20th 2011 Nickelodeon and CBS and many other...

 uses Akamai for hosting video. MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to put all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, partly free and openly available to anyone, anywhere. MIT OpenCourseWare is a large-scale, web-based publication of...

 utilizes Akamai's EdgeSuite for its content delivery network.

Other customers include Facebook

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

, Twitter

Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

, AMD, Amazon.com

Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

, Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...

, Netflix

Netflix

Netflix, Inc., is an American provider of on-demand internet streaming media in the United States, Canada, and Latin America and flat rate DVD-by-mail in the United States. The company was established in 1997 and is headquartered in Los Gatos, California...

, Macys, Miles Kimball, J. C. Penney

J. C. Penney

-External links:*...

, Yahoo!

Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

 and Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher founded on February 8, 1991 under the name Silicon & Synapse by three graduates of UCLA, Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce and currently owned by French company Activision Blizzard...

.

Acquisitions

In March 2005, Akamai signed an agreement to acquire Speedera Networks for 12 million shares of Akamai common stock, valued at $130 million at that time. Both companies also agreed to halt pending lawsuits involving trade secrets and patent infringement. The acquisition was completed in June 2005.

In November 2006, Akamai acquired Nine Systems Corporation for roughly $164 million using "approximately 2.7 million shares of their common stock, approximately $4.5 million in cash and the assumption of options to purchase approximately 400,000 shares of their common stock."

On April 12, 2007 Akamai acquired Red Swoosh in exchange for 350,000 shares of Akamai common stock. The acquisition of Red Swoosh was valued at approximately $15 million, net of cash acquired.

In March 2007, Akamai acquired Netli in exchange for 3.2 million shares of Akamai stock. The acquisition of Netli was valued at approximately $178 million.

In late 2008, Akamai acquired Acerno, a performance-based ad network, and launched a new division, Advertising Decision Solutions.

External links

• Akamai home page
• Traffic Cops Of The Net (BusinessWeek article)
• Akamai: In the Broadband Internet Sweet Spot (article)
• The Motley Fool's analysis of Akamai
• The Akamai Story: From Theory to Practice
• Yahoo! Finance "Akamai Technologies, Inc." Company Profile
• Washington Post profile of the company
• 'Akamai & The CDN Price Wars
• Globally Distributed Content Delivery