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Akamai said the deal will be ‘transformational’ for the company, with plans to acquire the AWS competitor within the first quarter of 2022.
Akamai Technologies has confirmed plans to acquire cloud hosting company Linode in a $900m deal, in order to become “the world’s most distributed compute platform”.
Akamai said Linode is one of the “most trusted” infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform providers. Founded in 2003, Linode has grown to 256 staff operating in 11 markets, with customers around the world.
It has advertised itself as an alternative to other cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). On its site, Linode says it helped pioneer cloud computing three years before AWS entered the market.
“There’s no question AWS is the big kahuna in the cloud,” the website says. “If you are a large enterprise and need the ability to customise your infrastructure, AWS is a good fit. But if you’re a small business owner or independent developer, having access to all of that advanced cloud technology comes at a cost: unnecessary complexity, risk of lock-in to Amazon’s ecosystem and frequent billing surprises.”
Linode CEO Christopher Aker said today’s customers face new challenges as cloud services become all-encompassing. He added that Linode and Akamai have a “natural synergy” and their combination of strengths will help clients meet these challenges.
“Linode will soon be able to call on the power of Akamai to offer entirely new products, services, expertise, locations and scale, while Akamai will be able to tap into Linode’s deep expertise in compute, storage and on-demand infrastructure-as-a-service,” Aker said.
Akamai shared its 2021 earnings yesterday (15 February), reporting revenue of $3.5bn last year, an 8pc increase. Its content delivery network comprises more than 325,000 servers worldwide and the company also offers cybersecurity and cloud services.
Akamai CEO Dr Tom Leighton described the acquisition as “transformational” for the company, as it will combine Linode’s developer-friendly cloud computing capabilities with Akamai’s edge platform and security services.
“Akamai has been a pioneer in the edge computing business for over 20 years, and today we are excited to begin a new chapter in our evolution by creating a unique cloud platform to build, run and secure applications from the cloud to the edge,” Leighton said.
“This is a big win for developers who will now be able to build applications on a platform that delivers unprecedented scale, reach, performance, reliability and security.”
The Massachusetts-headquartered company expects the deal to be completed in the first quarter of this year.
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