Watch out Sonal (Aryaka), here comes Akamai & Company ready to crash your party. Akamai has officially joined the WAN as-a-service party. After all, the WAN market is like 30x+ bigger than the CDN market. One can’t blame Akamai. The good news, with Akamai joining the party, it validates your idea, vision and out-of-box thinking in creating this truly innovative platform. Aryaka Networks is to the WAN as-a-service market, what Akamai is to the CDN market. The Aryaka executive team brings all their CDN knowledge gained from Speedera to Aryaka, pioneering something really special. The Aryaka WAN as-a-service is very scalable, because it is powered by a CDN like infrastructure.
Aryaka has a big fight on its hands. And it’s not Akamai that should be feared but Cisco. Everyone uses Cisco, but not everyone uses Akamai. With this new partnership, Akamai gets a big toehold into the Cisco customer base. The new Cisco and Akamai offering is called the “Cisco Intelligent WAN with Akamai Connect”, a robust cloud service offering that extends the Akamai CDN to the Cisco router located at the branch location. If a multi-site company is using the Cisco Integrated Service Router (ISR-AX) at the branch, Akamai plugs right in offering that customer packet acceleration and optimization from the 1st mile to the last mile over a private B2B network.
Aryaka has at least a two year start on Akamai. Aryaka has more than one hundred customers using it services, with some of those customers having hundreds of branch locations. How successful Akamai and Cisco going to be in this market? At this point, it is hard to tell, and it will take about 12 months to measure the progress of this new offering. The good news for Aryaka is that the WAN as-a-service market is big enough for two players. If Akamai is able to succeed in the WAN as-a-service and security market, it’s going to reach it’s $5B annual revenue milestone by 2020. In regards to Aryaka, it is already a big success, the next step for them is to go public in a few years.