Today, a once in a lifetime opportunity has presented itself to Akamai. It might disappear in a few weeks. Akamai has $1B of cash in the bank, and a stated revenue milestone of $5B by 2020. That’s a significant increase from the $1.57B they recorded in 2013. Over the last year, Akamai missed two big opportunities, Aspera and EdgeCast. Will Akamai miss another opportunity? Imperva stock is down 43%, and their market valuation decreased by $500M+. If there was ever a time for an acquisition, it is now.
The Akamai story rocks, from the time they first started, to where they are now. It’s the American dream. If Akamai were to acquire Imperva, it would be game over. Akamai would not only dominate the CDN business, but also the security business as well. Akamai would expand deeply into the security stack, from the edge to the data center. That means that Akamai could provide security from the time the packet leaves the customer location, to the customer data center, and everywhere in the cloud.
Should Akamai buy Imperva
Akamai could even cross over into FireEye’s domain, and maybe even Palo Alto Networks. However much fun it would be to watch this play out, it wouldn’t be fair. Competition is good for the economy. Maybe Akamai can get into the cloud storage business and take business away from EMC. Incapsula remains one of my favorite CDNs. I think they have huge billion dollar potential if they play their cards right.