Akamai, the company synonymous with content delivery networks (CDN), has been slowly transitioning to become the “world’s most distributed cloud services provider,” a transformation that is well on its way.
Akamai is one of the leading CDN providers in the world, but the company has been diversifying and expanding into other categories. According to Protocol, the company’s most recent quarter saw its security and compute business combine to surpass its delivery revenue. More significantly, the company’s delivery revenue fell by 6%, while its security revenue increased 23% and its compute revenue grew by 32%.
“Next year, security will be the largest of the three,” CEO Tom Leighton said in an interview with Protocol.
“It won’t be the majority yet by itself, but it’ll be bigger than delivery and compute. Depends how fast compute grows, but that’s an enormous market, and who knows, maybe compute will be the largest in five years. It’ll be a tough fight with security for that crown, because those are both very fast-growing areas for Akamai.”
Akamai has been working on this transition for some time, purchasing cloud provider Linode for $900 million in February 2022. When the acquisition was announced, Leighton specifically highlighted the role Linode would play in Akamai’s transformation as a driving motivation for the purchase.
“Akamai has been a pioneer in the edge computing business for over 20 years, and today we are excited to begin a new chapter in our evolution by creating a unique cloud platform to build, run and secure applications from the cloud to the edge. This a big win for developers who will now be able to build applications on a platform that delivers unprecedented scale, reach, performance, reliability and security.”
