Akamai Technologies

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Akamai Technologies, Inc.
Image:Akamai logo.png
Type Public (NASDAQ: AKAM)
Founded 1998
Headquarters Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Key people George H. Conrades, Chairman
Paul L. Sagan, President & CEO
Industry Internet software & Services
Products Content and Application Delivery
Application-Performance Services
On-demand-managed services
Business Performance-Management Services
Revenue $283.115 Million USD (2005)
Net income $327.998 Million USD (2005)
Employees 784 (2005)
Slogan The trusted choice for online business
Website www.akamai.com

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM) is a company that provides a distributed computing platform for global Internet content caching and application delivery, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was founded by then-MIT graduate student Daniel Lewin, along with MIT Applied Mathematics professor Tom Leighton and MIT Sloan School of Management students Jonathan Seelig and Preetish Nijhawan. Leighton still serves as Akamai's Chief Scientist. Akamai is a Hawaiian word meaning "intelligent" or "clever." Beyond the name, the company has no ties with Hawaii.

Akamai's customers include Musician's Friend, E*TRADE, American Express, Yahoo!, AOL Radio, Symantec, Match.com, Google, Microsoft, FedEx, BBC News website, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Xerox, iVillage, Apple Inc., Music Television (MTV), the United States Geological Survey, the White House, Reuters, Newegg.com, Guitar Center, Friendster, iTunes, REI, and XM Satellite Radio. A list of more customers can be found on Akamai's website.

Arabic news network Al-Jazeera was a customer from March 28, 2003, until April 2, 2003, when Akamai decided to end the brief relationship.

Co-founder Daniel Lewin was killed aboard American Airlines Flight 11 during the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Contents

In the diagram shown, we see a web page on an Akamaized website (in this example, www.acme.com) deliver certain content (usually media objects such as audio, graphics, animation, video) from servers owned by Akamai. It is important to note that even though the domain name is the same, namely www.acme.com and image.acme.com, the IP address (server) that image.acme.com points to is actually owned by Akamai and not ACME.

Akamai content delivery to a user
Akamai content delivery to a user
  1. The client's browser requests the default web page at the ACME site. The site returns the web page index.html.
  2. If the HTML code is examined you can see that there is a link to an image hosted on the Akamai owned server image.acme.com.
  3. When your web browser processes the HTML code it reaches the line that points to bigpicture.jpg and pulls that object from image.acme.com.

In addition to image caching, Akamai provides services which accelerate dynamic and personalized content, J2EE-compliant applications, and streaming media.

An example of Akamai's streaming media solutions include its collaboration with GlobalTec to produce WizeTradeTV [1].

Advanced Search
Included Web Search Engines


Safe Search

close

Top Matching Results

Occasionally Search.com will highlight specialized results that are based on the context of your query. Examples of specialized results include specific links to news, images, or video.

Top Matching Results may highlight information from other Search.com pages, content from the CNET Network of sites, or third party content. The listings are based purely on relevance. Search.com does not receive payment for listings in this section but our partners that provide this data may get paid for listing these products.

Sponsored Links

This section contains paid listings which have been purchased by companies that want to have their sites appear for specific search terms and related content. These listings are administered, sorted and maintained by a third party and are not endorsed by Search.com.

Search Results

Search.com sends your search query to several search engines at one time and integrates the results into one list which has been sorted by relevance using Search.com's proprietary algorithm. You can customize the list of search engines included in your metasearch from the preferences.

The search engines that are used in your metasearch may allow companies to pay to have their Web sites included within the results. To view the Paid Inclusion policy for a specific search engine, please visit their Web site. Search.com does not accept payment or share revenue with any search engine partner for listings in this section.