Akamai Technologies acquired API security company Noname this year, which will lead its API security portfolio. Noting a lion’s share of the company’s revenue comes from cybersecurity and cloud services, Prasad Mandava, the managing director and vice president of engineering at Akamai India, said the company is also transforming into the most distributed service with its generalised edge compute offering called Gecko.

“Akamai has several edge points of presence, which traditionally is our strength. Increasingly, there is interest in being close to the edge. Customers want to host their applications and workloads close to their users, servers, or data sources and that is what Gecko enables,” he said, adding that the company plans to establish three edge computing units in Delhi, Bangalore, and Hyderabad by the year’s end. This is in addition to its existing units in Mumbai and Chennai.

Edge network

Currently, Akamai has an edge network with over 4,100 points of presence across 130 countries.

The MD addressed that edge compute, as a concept, has been around for some time. “There is interest in Gecko for various unique applications we will enable through that edge compute. We tried it out more than a decade ago when it was nascent and people didn’t have enough take. But with the current usage of the Internet, people are saying they want to host their workloads near the edge.”

Akamai also recently acquired Noname for approximately $450 million following the acquisition of Guardicore in 2021 at about $600 million and Linode in 2022 at about $900 million. “Globally, we examine tech companies within our area of interest. We sometimes look at a specific technology to say it’s a technology acquisition,” Mandava said.

Noname is expected to accelerate Akamai’s ability to meet growing customer demand and market requirements as the use of APIs continues to expand. The company can extend protection across all API traffic locations, despite the business, integration, or deployment requirements customers may have. Akamai also expects to gain greater scale with Noname’s additional sales, marketing resources, established channel, and alliance relationships.

“Noname, a company with a global presence, has a strong offering with good marquee customers. That’s typically what we consider when it comes to acquisitions,” Mandava said.

Cloud computing

With the acquisition of Linode, Akamai is now into cloud computing, he added. On the other hand, Guardicore’s micro-segmentation products will be added to Akamai’s portfolio of Zero Trust solutions to protect enterprises from damage caused by breaches like ransomware, while safeguarding the critical assets at the network’s core.

“We acquired Guardicore which does microsegmentation and is a market leader. We have been evolving a unified platform for cyber security under enterprise security and zero trust.” 

He added that India is an identified critical growth market for Akamai. “We want to ensure that apart from the talent pool, we want to be part of its growth story, especially with all the digital services’ heavy reliance on APIs. We have been noticing API services rising globally, including in India. A lot of digital payments run on APIs,” The company currently has 278 customers in India.

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