Akamai just acquired Soasta and the industry impact is monumental. Don’t look at the acquisition at face value, because everything Akamai does is strategic with a long term objective. The best way to analyze this specific event – is to look at the big picture. On February 9, 2016, Akamai announced a reorganization. In short, a reorg means out with old and in with the new. The Akamai we’re seeing today is an entirely different person, and this person is shaking up the entire industry – CDN, APM, Security, WAN, etc.

In one blow, Akamai takes aim at Cedexis, Instart Logic, Catchpoint, Cisco (AppDynamics) and New Relic. Soasta doesn’t give Akamai  “Application Performance Monitoring” features like AppDynamics and New Relic, but it does give Akamai a taste of APM. And you can bet that Akamai will get into the APM business in twelve months because it is a billion dollar market. When we look at APM, it is the perfect CDN feature set – its provides immediately value, its expensive, its a premium service and it leads to a ton of consulting services.

AWS is the leader in providing compute instances to the leading online companies. However, what is better – providing compute instances to online companies or being able to provide code level diagnostics and monitoring within the applications? It is the latter. Akamai will become a leader in APM in due time.

Akamai’s Recent Announcements

• Enterprise Application Access (Soha Systems) – replaces VPN services offered by Telcos to large enterprises. This service is a game changer.
• Akamai Media Acceleration- video delivery service based on QUIC UDP.
• Akamai Ion – incorporates machine learning algorithms to mobile delivery. It’s a big step into the field of edge compute and edge intelligence.