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Akamai, popularly known to be a content delivery network(CDN) provider, has in the recent past shifted and forayed into cloud services and cybersecurity. It has also made acquisitions - Linode and Guardicore - to aid the growth. Its CEO and Co-founder, Tom Leighton, spoke to businessline about the company’s growth, its presence in the Indian market, and plans to set up compute centres and increase its workforce in the country. Edited excerpts.
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The PCS market is growing at a CAGR of 23.1 per cent for 2021-26On the evolution of the organisation post the shift from majorly CDN to cloud and security and the acquisition strategy?
Content delivery was 99 per cent of our revenue; we were just starting our application firewall business as a service. Next year, security will be our biggest product line, no longer content delivery, which is a big shift. And, we’re rapidly growing our computing business, running it at almost half a billion-dollar run rate. We are a little behind on the schedule of $5 billion (Akamai had earlier aimed to hit $5 billion in revenue by 2020). The currency fluctuations dampen the growth as Asia Pacific and Japan have been our fastest-growing markets.
The way to think of us going forward is the world’s most distributed cloud provider. We’ve been doing edge computing for a long time but in Compute, 99 plus per cent of the market is core cloud computing, and we’ve not had an offering there before. But now, we’re adding that with a Linode acquisition and ramping it up in terms of its scale, points of presence, and capabilities so that we can take on mission-critical traffic, and compute for the world’s biggest enterprises. Hence, that’ll be a big driver for revenue going forward.
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Attacks on critical infra and use of ransomware-as-a-service expected to increaseHow do you see things evolving in the Indian market, how have you scaled your capabilities in India over the years?
India appears to be doing very well, revenue growth here is very good for us in a tough year. We are also growing our human presence here. Our headcount now here is more than a quarter of the entire company, and that fraction is growing. Out of 10,000 overall employees, over 2500 are here in India.
We have a whole reflection of Akamai in Bangalore, almost every area for every division is represented here. We have our Security Operations Command Centre, Network Operations Command Centre, and Broadcast operation command centre in India. We also have the Indian team to set the go-to-market, sales, and marketing team, based here.
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We have plans for substantial growth in India, particularly, we’re making heavy investments in enterprise security, and in computing. With the Linode acquisition, we are looking at building out half a dozen major compute centres, here in India, which would put us on a footing with the best of the hyperscalers. We also want to build out teams here, for the development of capabilities on the platform for integration of third-party apps and support around that. India will become a major force for us in our compute business.
What are your thoughts on Government regulations around data and privacy? How do you see this evolving, what are the challenges you can see?
It is a complicated landscape. We see it in the US as various States having rules. We’ve seen it in the EU as they’re one of the early movers, it is incredibly complicated in China as well. India is also exploring. We’re working with the regulators in these various geographies to help try to define reasonable policies to help educate so people understand. With our Edge platform, one of the major advantages is that we have servers in 4000 locations, allowing us to receive requests locally and provide them locally.
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