Internet Economy is unleashing opportunities

Global investors and companies are convinced with India's growth in the internet side and wish to invest to be part of the ecosystem or what is otherwise known as internet economy. Dataquest had a conversation with Dr. Tom Leighton CEO & co-founder of Akamai Technologies who visited India last month to get a sense about the market opportunities for the company. Dr Leighton, who served as Akamai's chief scientist for 14 years before becoming the chief executive, is a renowned expert on internet. He walked us through the key trends and his company's plans in India. Excerpts.

How much hopeful are you regarding the India market and growth opportunities for companies like you?

We see a lot of potential in the Indian market based on different positive trends. Particularly, the faster growth of internet is paving way for internet economy in the country. Consumers are rapidly looking for variety of content online. I believe that the rapid pace at which internet is growing will help thrive activities such as news consumption, video consumption, social media connectivity, and ecommerce. The growth is positive and so an encouraging trend for companies such as ours. In short, the internet economy is unleashing business opportunities for content providers, demand for bandwidth, and different apps.

What all services do you offer to customers in India?

Akamai offers a complete set of solutions that meets all of our customers online business needs, enabling them to accelerate innovation. The list of solutions we provide to our customers in India and globally cover web, media, enterprise, security, and network solutions. This set of solutions are built on the Akamai Intelligent Platform, providing the customers with flexibility and agility to conduct and dynamically expand their online businesses without worrying about website performance or security.

What are the growing areas for Akamai in Indian market?

There are over 900 mn mobile phone subscribers and over 120 mn internet connections in India. The mobile internet adoption is much faster than the developed world. Connectivity speeds are growing at 40% plus YoY, according to our State of the Internet report. The emergence of the hyperconnected world has presented new technology challenges for businesses, as they strive to deliver content and applications to customers, partners, suppliers and employees, independent of user device or physical location.

This increased use of bandwidth has proved to be a business opportunity for Akamai as we are uniquely positioned to help our customers engage users across the web, mobile, cloud through a mix of public and private network environments.

There is an immense opportunity for us in eCommerce, media, and government sectors. All top media organizations, commerce enterprise, IT/ITeS and manufacturing companies as well as companies hosting a lot of their application on the cloud are the potential customers for Akamai in India.

Since IT organizations are under tremendous pressure to meet the growing bandwidth demands of public and private cloud traffic, how do you plan to reap this opportunity?

The unique thing about traffic-be it organizational, web or enterprise applications-is that it swells up to fill any available bandwidth. It could be a matter of applications and devices becoming richer and enhanced, or flash surges due to seasons, events, and financial closures.

With these aspects, Akamai's Intelligent Platform acts as a buffer for organizations who want to scale up quickly in terms of bandwidth spikes or distribution. Akamai is hence uniquely poised to take advantage of this trend with constant build out and enhancement of our platform and also to new innovations.

Akamai recently partnered with Cisco to deliver the world's first enterprise WAN to provide a secure, high-quality service for both public and private cloud applications.