Akamai Technologies

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Akamai Technologies, Inc. <tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align:center; padding:16px 0 16px 0;">Image:Akamai logo.gif</td></tr>
Type	Public (NASDAQ: AKAM)
Founded	1995
Headquarters	Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA <tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Key people</th><td>George H. Conrades, Chairman Paul L. Sagan, President & CEO</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Industry</th><td>Internet software & Services</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Products</th><td>Content and Application Delivery Application-Performance Services On-demand-managed services Business Performance-Management Services</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Revenue</th><td>Image:Green Arrow Up.svg$283.115 Million USD (2005)</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Net income</th><td>Image:Green Arrow Up.svg$327.998 Million USD (2005)</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Employees</th><td>784 (2005)</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Slogan</th><td>The trusted choice for online business</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Website</th><td>www.akamai.com</td></tr>

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a corporation that provides a distributed computing platform for global Internet content caching and application delivery. The company was founded by a then-MIT graduate student, Daniel Lewin, along with MIT Applied Mathematics professor Tom Leighton and MIT Sloan School of Management students, Jonathan Seelig and Preetish Nijhawan. Leighton still serves as Akamai's Chief Scientist. Akamai is a Hawaiian word meaning "intelligent" or "clever." Beyond the name, the company has no ties with Hawaii.

Akamai's customers include E*TRADE, American Express, Yahoo!, AOL Radio, Symantec, Match.com, Google, Microsoft, FedEx, BBC News website, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Xerox, iVillage, Apple Computer, Music Television (MTV), the United States Geological Survey, the White House, Reuters, Newegg.com, and XM Satellite Radio. A list of more customers can be found on Akamai's Website.

Arabic news network Al-Jazeera was a customer from March 28, 2003 until April 2, 2003, when Akamai decided to end the brief relationship.

Co-founder Daniel Lewin was killed aboard American Airlines Flight 11 during the September 11, 2001 attacks.

1 Content delivery to a user
2 See also
3 External links
4 References

[edit] Content delivery to a user

In the diagram shown, we see a web page on an Akamaized website (www.acme.com) deliver certain content (usually media objects such as audio, graphics, animation, video) from servers owned by Akamai. It is important to note that even though the domain name is the same, namely www.acme.com and image.acme.com, the IP address (server) that image.acme.com points to is actually owned by Akamai and not ACME. Image:Akamaiprocess.png

The client's browser requests the default web page at the ACME site. The site returns the web page index.html.
If the HTML code is examined you can see that there is a link to an image hosted on the Akamai owned server image.acme.com.
When your web browser processes the HTML code it reaches the line that points to bigpicture.jpg and pulls that object from image.acme.com.

In addition to image caching, Akamai provides services which accelerate dynamic and personalized content, J2EE-compliant applications, and streaming media.