'We enable enterprises to handle the demand economy'

There's no better example of a resilient company that has withstood the

crests and troughs of the Internet wave than US-based Akamai Technologies. If

the dotcom bust was not damaging enough, the Internet content delivery services

company found itself again sucked into the very core of the 9/11 tragedy. Its

founder Daniel Lewin was unfortunately a passenger on the ill-fated American

Airlines flight that struck the World Trade Center. CEO Paul Sagan has steered

the company through troubled waters, boasting revenues of over $250 mn. Akamai

recently acquired rival Speedera Networks with which it had a bitter lawsuit

over patent infringement. Sagan was in Bangalore to announce the integration of

Speedera's operations with Akamai. He shared his views on the merger and

market trends with Priya Padmanabhan of CyberMedia News.

What is the reasoning behind the acquisition?



The best kind of acquisition happens when companies in the same space come

together. When you have two similar companies in terms of market focus, mindset

and customer focus, it's successful. Here, you have two of the leading

companies in content delivery and application performance industry. So this is a

natural merger.

Paul Sagan

The first benefit is the valuable customer base that has been buying content

delivery services from Speedera. We can now offer them a broader suite of

services. We also hope to bring some of Speedera's features and functionality

to Akamai customers. One such technology is reporting and data intelligence.

How does the Bangalore center figure in the overall scheme of things?



One of the unique aspects of Speedera's Bangalore center is that the

Indian operation is a complete office. Speedera has a complete office that has

everything from product management to development, engineering to selling and

marketing. This gives us agility, time-to-market advantage and above all a

competitive edge. We will be integrating our operations here. Speedera has some

customers here like Rediff, The Times of India, and Wipro.

Can you elaborate on the content delivery market and where do you stand in

the business?



We look at web hosting, content delivery, performance of Internet-based

applications, and business metrics and data. We compete against homegrown large

corporations with big IT departments that prefer to manage content delivery and

applications themselves than outsource it. We have to convince them that we can

do it better, faster, and cheaper on their behalf. We also compete with large

managed service providers like AT&T, whose pitch is that we may not be

experts but we are a one-stop shop.

We believe that the Internet is now critical to business success. It takes a

great deal of expertise to understand and manage for an enterprise that is

betting a significant part of its future operations on the Internet's

performance. The market is moving significantly from a supply-based economy to a

demand economy. When the Internet came, the leverage was shifted to the demand

side, that is, to the buyer. For companies to shift to this demand economy, it

is important to have a web strategy.