Akamai has been busy in Q1 of 2015. First, they made a strategic investment in Saguna Networks. Next, they announced a plan to hire 1,000 employees this year. Thereafter, Akamai acquired Xerocole, a start-up offering an innovative DNS platform to the service provider market. Xerocole, based in Boulder, CO was founded in 2010, and has 10 employees. A bulk of the team previously worked at Sandvine. Xerocole’s partners include Yahoo, Namespace, Symantec, Damballa, Securifi and Lastline. The acquisition was a brilliant move, and it adds cool DNS technology to Akamai’s portfolio. Plus, they get a handful of brand name partners and customers, and acquire a solid engineering team well versed in DNS. An infrastructure company can never have enough DNS engineers, caching engineers, or software engineers with a security focus.
Akamai has enough cash on hand to make a dozen of these type of acquisitions this year and next. However, what we are patiently waiting for is the “game changer” acquisition, and it can even be a small start-up. Adding an Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) feature set to the portfolio would do wonders for Akamai. Ironically, one of Xerocole’s partners is Lastline, a mini-version of FireEye. If Akamai made a move on Lastline, it would be a very disruptive move, and it would send ripple effects throughout the CDN market and pure-play security industry. In short, it would put Akamai on a collision course with FireEye, as Akamai would have single handily converged once two separate industries into one. Its a long shot, but these are the types of activities that will help Akamai reach its $5B revenue goal by 2020.