Akamai CEO Tom Leighton Seeing Increased Demand, To Set Up Edge Computing Centres In India

US-based technology company Akamai is seeing increased demand in the India market. With the compute business picking up, it plans to establish edge computing centres in the region, said Tom Leighton, chief executive officer and co-founder of Akamai. 

The company, popularly known to be a content delivery network provider, has shifted focus to cloud services and cybersecurity to drive growth. While India has been a major operational base, it is also now a large market for Akamai. 

“India is also a large market in terms of our sales operation and growing rapidly across all our product areas. In terms of the customer base, we're seeing demand across multiple verticals. We work with the leading media, commerce companies, financial institutions, and government entities here,” Leighton told NDTV Profit. 

India also drives a vendor to offer compelling solutions and strong performance at a very affordable price point. Customers look at pricing critically, presenting a challenge, but Akamai benefits from it, he added. 

As the company expands its cloud business, it plans to set up edge computing centres in multiple locations in India. Akamai has data infrastructure in 51 cities in India with over 300 points of presence. It has three cloud computing and storage facilities, two in Mumbai and one in Chennai. 

“As we look to the next generation of our edge computing POPs, there will be many of them located here in India. We want to be where the people are and support customers' applications close to where the people are, so they get the best performance and the lowest latency,” Leighton said. 

In India, Akamai has 3,000 employees and this number represents 30% of its global workforce of 10,000 employees. Leighton noted that every function of the company has a large presence in India. The region drives operations for cloud computing, security and delivery businesses. 

Akamai, in tandem with the pivot to cloud services and security, has made multiple acquisitions in the recent past, namely Linode, Guardicore, and Noname. 

Commenting on the performance of the acquisitions, the CEO said, “We are seeing fabulous growth and success from our recent large acquisitions. Guardicore is a leader in segmentation for enterprises, as it keeps enterprises safe from ransomware and data exfiltration malware. We are seeing strong early traction with Noname in the security space, and with the Linode acquisition, we are starting to see really excellent growth there in terms of taking on mission-critical applications from companies."