Dr. Tom Leighton, Akamai’s co-founder and Chief Scientist, will succeed Paul Sagan as the company’s CEO. Sagan announced earlier this year that he intended to step down.
Leighton has been the technological visionary at Akamai since its founding in 1998. Prior to founding Akamai, Dr. Leighton was a Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT and a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Dr. Leighton holds numerous patents involving content delivery, Internet protocols, network algorithms, distributed computing, cryptography, and digital rights management.
- Earlier this month, AT&T announced a strategic alliance with Akamai Technologies to deliver a global suite of content delivery network (CDN) solutions to companies.
Under the deal, Akamai will deploy CDN servers at the edge of AT&T’s IP network and in AT&T facilities throughout the United States. AT&T will transfer its existing CDN operations, customers and service to the Akamai platform in 2013. The companies have also agreed to dedicate shared resources including technical support, customer care, marketing and professional services support. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The companies said the combination of AT&T’s network assets with Akamai’s CDN will help enterprises simplify content distribution management and drive higher-performing end user experiences for consumers accessing content on the Internet. They hope to expand their efforts internationally within 12 months.
- Separately, Akamai announced the acquisition of Verivue, a privately-held company based in Westford, Massachusetts that provides licensed content delivery network (CDN) infrastructure solutions for network operators. The combination of the two companies’ technologies and teams is expected to help Akamai accelerate market availability of a comprehensive portfolio of Operator CDN products.
