Www.akamai.com/dl/technical_publications/GloballyDistributedContentDelivery.pdf. Akamai & the CDN Price Wars. Akamai Technologies (AKAM) investors are the stock market’s walking wounded. Over the last month, the stock has plummeted to about $33 a share, wiping out over $3 billion in market capitalization. The slide began soon after the company announced its second quarter earnings, indicating that it would have to spend more, and its gross margins were going to decline. The reason: price wars. For a very long time, Akamai, thanks to its arsenal of patents and early technological leads, had a near dominant market share in the content delivery network sector.
It was able to charge a lot of money for delivering bits more reliably. Their dominant position meant that investors plowed a lot of money into their stock, pushing it to nosebleed levels. That burp has come with the increase in the number of competitors, each one trying to cash in on the boom in online video and other digital content. Related Stories 1. The Akamai Story: From Theory to Practice.
04/21/2004 12:30 PM La Sala de Puerto Rico F. Thomson Leighton, Ph.D. '81, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Akamai; Professor of Applied Mathematics, MIT Description: If you have ever wondered what it means for a website to become "Akamaized," this lecture about the company's origins explains much of the mystery. But before there was an Akamai, there were research problems lots of them. Nearly 15 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee, architect of the World Wide Web, asked Tom Leighton to think about solutions to future — and now familia r— Internet issues: bottlenecks that form when users flood to a particular site, often along a single Internet supply line.
Leighton's team generated algorithms (and publications and advanced degrees) while figuring out the fastest means to move information from here to there. Along the way, they learned some tricks to outsmart Internet service providers who slow traffic down by bumping competitors' data from their network lines. Credit license MIT TechTV.
Break Down: Akamai Technologies [Rule Breaker] August 3, 2000. "Break Down August" means that we're spending this month analyzing several Rule Breaker candidates in search of a new purchase, with each company being subjected to a detailed analytical "Break Down. " Akamai Technologies, the first Rule Breaker candidate that we'll study, has created a vital technology: Intelligent Internet content distribution. It is the first mover and the top dog in the field, which will become a vast industry as bandwidth usage increases. By I'm delighted to kick off the search by introducing you to one of my favorite companies, Akamai Technologies (Nasdaq: AKAM). Know at the outset that The Motley Fool was one of the early customers of Akamai, that many of our techies here own shares in the company, and that some serve on Akamai's customer advisory board.
I, too, have been impressed by what I see as Akamai's vital product, leading market position, and devotion to its customers. Let's jump straight to the first, key Rule Breaker criteria: Yahoo! If Yahoo! Your Turn! Traffic Cops Of The Net. For weeks, techies were abuzz with speculation about Apple's (AAPL) plans to move into movies. And at a Sept. 12 announcement, CEO Steven P. Jobs didn't disappoint, telling a packed audience of journalists in San Francisco that Apple will begin by offering downloads of Walt Disney Co. films. But for many investors, an equally intriguing story has been the company that will make sure all those billions of video bytes don't bring Apple's iTunes Web site to a grinding halt.
Few tech companies have been hotter over the past year than Akamai Technologies Inc. (AKAM) It's a prime example of the rich profits that can be made on the Web's plumbing -- the data centers, servers, and services that keep rising levels of data traffic moving smoothly. And if you believe CEO Paul Sagan, 47, cousin of the late scientist Carl Sagan, there are billions and billions more dollars where those came from.
That same year, Sagan arrived as something of a misfit in this geek paradise. By William C. Cloud Services, Enterprise, Mobile, Security Solutions | Akamai. Content delivery network. (Left) Single server distribution (Right) CDN scheme of distribution Content providers such as media companies and e-commerce vendors pay CDN operators to deliver their content to their audience of end-users. In turn, a CDN pays ISPs, carriers, and network operators for hosting its servers in their data centers. Besides better performance and availability, CDNs also offload the traffic served directly from the content provider's origin infrastructure, resulting in possible cost savings for the content provider.[1] In addition, CDNs provide the content provider a degree of protection from DoS attacks by using their large distributed server infrastructure to absorb the attack traffic.
While most early CDNs served content using dedicated servers owned and operated by the CDN, there is a recent trend[2] to use a hybrid model that uses P2P technology. In the hybrid model, content is served using both dedicated servers and other peer-user-owned computers as applicable. Operation[edit] Akamai Technologies. Akamai headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA The company was founded in 1998 by Daniel M. Lewin (then a graduate student at MIT) and MIT applied mathematics professor Tom Leighton.
Lewin was killed aboard American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed in the September 11 attacks of 2001. Leighton currently serves as Akamai's CEO. Akamai is a Hawaiian word meaning "intelligent" or "clever". History[edit] Akamai Technologies entered the 1998 MIT $50K competition with a business proposition based on their research, and were selected as one of the finalists.[7] By August 1998 they had developed a working prototype, and with the help of Jonathan Seelig, Preetish Nijhawan, and Randall Kaplan, they began taking steps to incorporate the company.[8] In late 1998 and early 1999, a group of business professionals joined the founding team.
On July 1, 2001, Akamai was added to the Russell 3000 Index and Russell 2000 Index.[13] In 2005, Paul Sagan was named chief executive officer of Akamai.