Surprise surprise, after many years of laying low, Akamai has finally stepped out of its comfort zone and declared war on the pure-play CDN Ecosystem. Time will tell, but it seems that Akamai has set its eyes on being an innovation driven CDN, like many CDN start-ups. Akamai is large and many large companies have difficulty being innovation driven, but Akamai is not AT&T-large where red tape and bureaucracy rain supreme. Even EMC who is several times larger than Akamai is innovating at a faster pace. However, it seems Akamai has changed direction and is dead set on reaching its $5B revenue goal by 2020. An Oppenheimer Analyst recently stated that Akamai needed to make $2B worth in acquisitions before it could reach its $5B revenue goal.

We would agree with Oppenheimer, if Akamai operated in its status quo mode like it has the last several years. But if Akamai stepped out of its comfort zone, and invested a few hundred million dollars on new technology projects and ideas, they can create billion dollar product lines. Google is the Internet, but in second place it’s Akamai, not Cisco. Akamai has a large force of brainiac scientist on its bench, who are being contained in a box, all they have to do is let them out so they can do some major damage to the web infrastructure ecosystem. In the coming months we’ll spend time analyzing the new Akamai feature sets, value prop, and customer wins, so we can separate the wheat from the chaff, and the marketing fluff from the actual. This is what the new Akamai solution portfolio looks like.

Akamai Feature Set