Over the last several years, the revolution in information technology (IT) has resulted in innovations that are having increasingly visible effects on the life of the average people. These developments affect not only how people work, but also where they work, how much they work, or with whom they interact face to face or electronically. The Internet is an integral part of our everyday lives. Because of the distributed nature of the Internet, there is no single point of measurement for total Internet traffic. Internet traffic data from public peering points can give an indication of Internet volume and growth, but these figures exclude traffic that remains within a single service provider's network as well as traffic that cross private peering points. AKAMAI Technologies is currently a content delivery network industry leader. AKAMAI is a company that provides a distributed computing platform for global internet content and application delivery. However, over the past five years the industry has begun to shift, resulting in more competitors entering the market and additional demand for new and improved services. This paper discusses how the company made it through difficult instances.
AKAMAI as a Business, a Commercial Service and a Network Provider The father of the Web foresaw the congestion of network, and he challenged colleagues at MIT to invent a fundamentally new and better way to deliver Internet content. Exposing such an academic problem would ultimately result in a service that is revolutionizing the Internet. Tom Leighton and Danny Lewin, developed a set of breakthrough algorithms for intelligently routing and replicating content over a large network of distributed servers – without relying n centralized servers typically used by Web site owners today. Jonathan Seelig and Preetish Nijhawan then enrolled in the MIT Sloan M.B.A. program. Joined the foundation team, and they began building the business plan that would lead to Akamai’s inception. The group entered the esteemed annual MIT $50K entrepreneurship competition, where the company’s business proposition was selected as one of six finalists among 100 entries. The distinction signaled that Internet content delivery had serious market potential. AKAMAI obtained an exclusively license to certain intellectual property from MIT, and development efforts began in the fall of 1998. Together, these computer scientists and experienced Internet professionals founded AKAMAI, a company dedicated to ending the “World Wide Wait” through intelligent Internet content delivery. The company launched commercial service in April 1999 and announced that one of the world’s most trafficked Web properties, Yahoo!, was a charter customer. In late 1998 and early 1999, a group of experienced Internet business professionals began to join this founding team. Paul Sagan who was a former President of Time Inc. New Media, a founder of Road Runner cable modem service and who helped launched NY 1 News, became chief operating officer and eventually president of AKAMAI Technologies. George Conrades, former chairman and chief executive officer of BBN Corporation and senior vice president of U.S. Operations for IBM, assumed the helm as chief executive officer a few months later. AKAMAI has over 18,000 servers world-wide that supports edge caching and computing. They utilize a secure “slice” of the AKAMAI network with over 1,000 servers. AKAMAI is situated on the Internet’s 1,100 plus top networks and network peering points with a transaction delivery latency of less than 0.35 seconds. They also offer unique ability to “bridge” ISP back bones when networks are down, when network congestion occurs and when virus, worm, hacker or other malicious activity is detected.