Akamai pegs Linode’s cloud to its CDN

When it comes to American cloud providers, it’s not just AWS, Google Cloud Compute and Microsoft Azure in life. In the IaaS market in particular, there are also smaller but big-toothed providers. This is notably the case of Digital Ocean or the small Tom Thumb Linode (approximately $40 million in revenue). Founded in 2003, employing more than 250 people and operating in 185 countries, the latter is positioned in particular on the market segments in computing power (dedicated CPU, shared, GPU, etc.), storage (block, object, etc.). But it also offers cloud orchestration tools (DNS, load balancing and VLAN) as well as development tools (Terraform, Ansible, etc.). Its destiny is now linked to that of Akamai, which announced its takeover for the tidy sum of 900 million dollars.

“We’ve built a cloud computing platform trusted by developers and businesses around the world. Today customers face new challenges as cloud services become global, including compute, storage, security and edge. Solving these challenges requires significant integration and scale that Akamai and Linode plan to bring together under one roof,” said Christopher Aker, CEO of Linode. According to the company, its platform greatly simplifies the process of running applications in the cloud with the ability to launch instances in seconds and control them via APIs, command lines or other tools. Among the usage scenarios combining Linode technologies with Akamai, we find for example for an e-commerce customer the possibility of coupling databases managed at Linode with Akamai’s personal data processing tools or even for an operator offering metaverse services to use distributed GPUs hosted at Linode and Akamai’s private backbone to deliver a virtual reality experience on any device.

Other acquisitions to come

By adding these IaaS bricks to its portfolio, the CDN specialist wants to offer “a single platform allowing developers to create, run and secure applications wherever they run,” said Tom Leighton, CEO of Akamai. This acquisition provides the content distribution network specialist with a growth driver in the cloud on a very specific and buoyant target. “One wondered where Akamai would turn after a decade of success. We now have the answer, it is entering the field of development with the acquisition of Linode,” explains Hoger Mueller, analyst at Constellation Research. “Higher developer productivity will likely require greater investment, so don’t be surprised to see Akamai strike again with more acquisitions soon.”

The transaction should be finalized before the end of March 2022. This is its second most significant acquisition in recent months after that of Guardicore last September for $600 million, positioned in the micro-segmentation dedicated to securing data networks. company. For its first quarter of 2022, Akamai is targeting revenues in a range between 896 and 910 million dollars (+6/+10% over one year) and an EBITDA margin of 43%.