Akamai is in the appliance business now, since Bloxx offers security products in the form of Hardware, Hybrid Cloud and Virtual. This acquisition ranks as one of the best Akamai has ever done, because it opens up a pandora’s box of viable business models and possible security offerings. Having that onsite appliance in which Akamai can call its own – is going to be a key driver to Akamai’s success in the Security Solutions and Digital Solutions business units, well into the future.
However, Akamai should not charge for the appliance like Palo Alto Networks does, because it’s not in the hardware business. Instead, the appliance should come as part of the monthly service; thus, if a customer elects to buy the “bloxx feature set” they will get an appliance as part of the deal. The takeaway – Akamai will be the only company in the security universe to offer a true end-to-end solution across the three different tiers as demonstrated below, at least for now.
Akamai should look at the Digital Media business unit through the same lens. Akamai doesn’t have any gaps when it comes to video streaming, but it should expand beyond the edge to the Data Center by acquiring encoding.com, and expand to the customer premise by acquiring Signiant – the largest provider of high performance file transfer services after Aspera. With this move, Akamai would practically corner a big part of the broadcast / video processing market. (Disclaimer: We are not financial analyst and we are not qualified investment advisors, so don’t use this data to make investment decisions).
Encoding.com provides Akamai with heavy duty video processing global infrastructure (runs on its own + AWS) that can be the beginning of a new video processing business, and maybe cloud compute. And Signiant brings with it – a premium customer base that includes broadcasters like ESPN, NFL, Disney, and so on (from a broadcasting perspective not video streaming). Signiant is a sticky product because once its integrated, its integrated into all the back-end customer workflows.