Akamai Technologies
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| Akamai Technologies, Inc. | |
| 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 | |
| Net income | |
| 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.
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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.
- The client's browser requests the default web page at the ACME site. The site returns the web page index.html.
- 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.
- 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].
- Akamai home page
- Traffic Cops Of The Net (BusinessWeek article)
- Akamai: In the Broadband Internet Sweet Spot (article)
- The Motley Fool's analysis of Akamai
- The Akamai Story: From Theory to Practice
- Yahoo! Finance "Akamai Technologies, Inc." Company Profile
- Washington Post profile of the company
- Theory of how Akamai works
- Why do CDNs peer with ISPs?
- Akamai ends Al Jazeera server support
- Al Jazeera Denied Akamai Services
- How Akamai Built its Caching Servers
- Globally Distributed Content Delivery
- Akamai partner in Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands