Akamai Technologies plans to acquire Linode in a remarkable $900-million worth deal. The acquisition will be “transformational” for Akamai, with plans to acquire the Amazon Web Services competitor in the first quarter of 2022.
Linode, which was founded in 2003, runs 11 data centers in the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. It appears to lease space from colocation and wholesale firms rather than owning the facilities directly, with its Atlanta data center being a DataBank site, its Singapore presence being a Pacnet data center, and its Frankfurt facility being a Telecity data center.
It claims to differentiate itself from larger competitors like Amazon Web Services by minimizing complexity and vendor lock-in. It is aimed at developers and small to medium-sized businesses.
Akamai pioneered the concept of the content delivery network (CDN) and presently manages over 275,000 servers in 136 countries. It has attempted to broaden its CDN product into a broader Edge platform in recent years.
Dr. Tom Leightonn, who serves the role of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Co-Founder of Akamai Technologies, had the following to say:
The opportunity to combine Linode’s developer-friendly cloud computing capabilities with Akamai’s market-leading Edge platform and security services is transformational for Akamai. 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. 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.
Christopher Aker, who serves the role of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and is the Founder of Linode, had the following to say:
The marriage of Linode’s compute and storage products with Akamai’s serverless, CDN, and security solutions will give customers a broader range of services to build, modernize, and scale the next generation of applications.
Akamai acquires Linode to offer a single cloud-to-edge platform for businesses https://t.co/QaKPXaUE3L
— IT Security News – www.itsecuritynews.info (@IT_securitynews) February 17, 2022
The companies announced in a conference call that they would work together to establish “the world’s most distributed compute platform – from cloud to edge,” making it easier for developers and enterprises to design, run, and protect apps.
The deal comes as Cloudflare, a competitor CDN, has begun to dabble in the cloud space, with a limited beta trial of R2 Object Storage, a competitor to Amazon Web Services’ S3, attracting over 9,000 clients. Edge Workers, a “serverless” services service similar to AWS Lambda, is also available from the company.
The deal is expected to be completed in late Q1 2022, subject to customary regulatory approvals.
