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Akamai |
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Established:1998
Head Quarters: Cambridge, MA
India Head: Sanjay Singh
Website: www.akamai.com
With more and more people taking to social networking and online audio / video downloads, big websites like Yahoo! are witnessing massive amounts of traffic. It causes servers to clog and connections to slow to a crawl. This has given rise to a new frustration: that of finding ways to sidestep network congestion as against the erstwhile frustration of generating appeal on the web. In the minds of most big web site publishers, the smartest thing in the world would be a solution that accelerates the limited speed of current network technology.
Akamai, based in Cambridge, MA employs complex math equations and thousands of scattered servers to ship packets of data efficiently and faster to Web surfers.
To understand Akamai's role, consider how the Internet works today. It comprises a staggering 15,000 different networks. That's double the number of networks that were operating in the late '90s, and all of them must interact for the 'Net to function smoothly. If all iTunes customers were sent to Apple's servers in California, the servers would soon be overwhelmed with requests. So Akamai distributes iTunes' songs, videos, podcasting, and audio-book catalogs to its network of more than 22,000 servers, which are placed on the premises of Internet service providers and other network operators across 70 countries. (Most are happy to host Akamai's servers without charge, to help their own nets run smoothly). Algorithms direct each customer to the Akamai server that can best handle their request. Usually, it's right in the same community.
Akamai's system decides within milliseconds, the fastest route to deliver each request for Web content to an individual surfer. To do that, Akamai continually tracks Internet traffic from nearly 1,000 networks where it has servers located. Rather than funneling all this information to a central point of control and risking a meltdown at the center that would knock out the entire system, the decision-making authority is distributed across all of the company's systems.
The Internet wouldn't be the same without Akamai's ability to store and deliver content and applications for its customers. For some web sites, especially those powered by user communities, a few seconds of transmission speed can be crucial. In 2005, for example, social networking site Friendster was overwhelmed as customers had to wait seemingly forever for pages, some with hundreds of photos, to load. It turned to Akamai, and by March 2006, Friendster's response time was slashed from 9.4 seconds to 3.4.
According to leading analysts, Akamai now controls well over half the content distribution market. What you see at the company's premises is an enormous sense of optimism and momentum. This translates into challenging tasks that its engineers constantly dabble with.
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