How old is akamai
You don't drive with your eyes on the rear-view mirror, so you might be more interested in this free report showing analyst forecasts for Akamai Technologies's future profits. But we do take comfort from the fact that they are investors in the company. I would find that kind of skin in the game quite encouraging, if I owned shares, since it would ensure that the leaders of the company would also experience my success, or failure, with the stock.
Akamai Technologies's earnings per share growth have been levitating higher, like a mountain goat scaling the Alps. That EPS growth certainly has my attention, and the large insider ownership only serves to further stoke my interest. The hope is, of course, that the strong growth marks a fundamental improvement in the business economics. So to my mind Akamai Technologies is worth putting on your watchlist; after all, shareholders do well when the market underestimates fast growing companies.
Before you take the next step you should know about the 2 warning signs for Akamai Technologies that we have uncovered. Although Akamai Technologies certainly looks good to me, I would like it more if insiders were buying up shares. If you like to see insider buying, too, then this free list of growing companies that insiders are buying , could be exactly what you're looking for.
Please note the insider transactions discussed in this article refer to reportable transactions in the relevant jurisdiction. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation.
We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned. Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team at simplywallst. Looking for the next 'big thing'? Cathie Wood knows where to find it.
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Back when The Starr Report was posted, Congress' servers couldn't keep up with hungry surfers. The Heaven's Gate site in quickly followed its cult members into oblivion. And when The Phantom Menace trailers hit the Web this spring, a couple of sites distributing them went down.
This is the "hot spot" problem: When too many people visit a site, the excessive load heats it up like an overloaded circuit and causes a meltdown. Just as something on the Net gets interesting, access to it fails. For more time-critical applications, the stakes are higher. When the stock market lurches and online traders go berserk, brokerage sites can hardly afford to buckle. In retail, slow responses will send impatient customers clicking over to the competition.
And users on relatively remote parts of the network - even tech hubs like Singapore - often suffer slow responses, not just during peak traffic.
ISPs address this problem by adding connections, expanding capacity, and running server farms to host client sites on many machines, but this still leaves content clustered in one place on the network.
Publishers can mirror sites at multiple hosting companies, helping to spread out traffic, but this means duplicating everything everywhere, even the files no one wants. A third remedy, caching, temporarily stores copies of popular files on servers closer to the user, but out of the original site's control.
Naturally, site publishers don't like this - it delivers stale content, preserves errors, and skews usage stats. In other words, massive landlock. So in , with their new algorithms in hand, Tom Leighton and Danny Lewin found themselves facing a sort of manifest destiny.
The Web's largest sites were straining to meet demand - and frequently failing. Most needed better traffic handling, a way to cool down hot spots and speed content delivery overall. And Tom and Danny had conceived a solution, a grand-scale alternative to the Net's routing system. In September, a California company called Sandpiper Networks introduced a service perilously similar to what they'd envisioned, but Tom and Danny's load-balancing solution was one step more radical, and the problem was plenty big for two contenders.
Paul Sagan, a content guy from Time Warner's Pathfinder, signed up to lead them, and the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup began building its own globe-spanning network of servers that would handle Web content in a brand-new way. It worked. With Akamai's FreeFlow service, all content pours through the entire network, instantly responding to demand, ebbing and flowing as needed, changing routes and locations in response to current conditions.
Its ocean of servers connects to the terra firma of the rest of the Net at scores of ports, all of which move data more quickly as conditions continually change.
Akamai withholds the names of the others, but you can tell if a site is using the service by viewing the page source and looking for akamaitech. A cursory test reveals "Akamaized" content at Yahoo! FreeFlow handled up to 3, hits per second for the two sites - million in total, many of them Mbyte downloads of the trailer. But the system never exceeded even 1 percent of its capacity. In fact, as the download frenzy overwhelmed other sites, Akamai picked up the slack.
Before long, Akamai became the exclusive distributor of all Phantom Menace QuickTimes, serving both of the official sites, starwars. So how does it work?
Companies sign up for Akamai's FreeFlow, agreeing to pay according to the amount of their traffic. Then they run a simple utility to modify tags, and the Akamai network takes over. Throughout the site, the system rewrites the URLs of files, changing the links into variables to break the connection between domain and location. On www. Under standard protocols, a But with Akamai's system, the address can resolve to any one of hundreds of servers, depending on current conditions and where you are on the Net.
And it can resolve a different way for someone else - or even for you, a few seconds later. This new method is more complicated, but like modern navigation, it opens new vistas of capacity and commerce.
Sandpiper remains Akamai's only direct competitor. In April it signed a deal with AOL and Inktomi to begin serving their sites and incorporating their servers into the Sandpiper network. But a month out of the starting gate, Akamai was running immediately neck and neck with its rival, both promising more than 1, servers by the end of the year. Partly because it arrived second, Akamai has had to differentiate its product.
The company has done this not only by focusing on fine points of the technology, but also by positioning itself as the intelligent solution. FreeFlow is the masterwork of leading scientists from MIT. What's more, the scientists of Akamai are algorithms people. Whereas network hackers tend to be masters of improvisation, spotting local problems and using intuition and quick experimentation to fire off fixes, algorithms people tend to be slower and more rigorous, examining and proving everything along the way.
They start with the most pared-down problems - sorting numbers, stacking rectangles, connecting dots - and build up to more complicated situations. They study how efficiently computer programs run under all conditions - the best, average, and worst-possible cases - as the mass of processors, connections, and information become infinitely large.
It may take them a while to find a solution they like, but when they do, they know it will work, both on paper and in any reality. This is the hot spot phenomenon: just as something on the Net gets interesting, access to it fails. So network growth doesn't scare algorithms people; they always push things to infinity anyway. In Tim asked Tom if he thought distributed algorithms could reliably solve the hot spot problem, and Tom's algorithms posse was intrigued. And then just one other one.
Is there a range now where you feel like in the sort of low 60s range is where that revenue is going to hover for those companies given the amount of growth you've seen in the last kind of 12 to 18 months from that? I think that's probably not a bad place to peg it, Jim. I mean the Q4 always tends to be a bit of a stronger quarter and that vertical is a little bit of seasonality there.
You always have renewals. So whenever you have a renewal, you'll see pull back a couple of million dollars depending on the timing and that sort of stuff. But I think in the 60s, low 60s is probably a decent place to peg it. Just wanted to talk a little bit about the buybacks.
You said you'd opportunistically use that to take advantage of the market valuation what level seem appropriate here. That's kind of the first question. So primarily, we've used the equity buyback to offset the equity dilution from employee grants. And from time to time, we do buy back additional shares, and we've seen that over the years. And we use an approach such that as the stock price declines, we will buy back more.
And I do feel that Akamai is worth a lot more in this market. And so you may see us buy back additional shares, especially depending on how the stock price fluctuates. Any other tools you think you need to make yourself more competitive in the market? Do you feel like you've got kind of the right mix here for that product set? We're always looking at new capabilities, as I mentioned. Of course, the attackers are always in abating with new forms of attack.
But I am very excited about the Guardicore acquisition. And I think it really does fill out and complete our access story, our ability to stop ransomware and malware. As I mentioned, we already have capabilities that prevent the malware from getting in. And even then it has to come through Akamai's application firewall.
So we're making sure that malware doesn't come in. We also have multifactor authentication, which make sure that the employee is who they say they are. And now with Guardicore, we stop the spread of the malware, if it does get in. And there are a lot of ways into the enterprise today. It is really despite all the defenses you try to put in place, somebody, for example, in the capital pipeline case, a password or potential gets out there.
Now we still have ways of catching that somebody is using a stolen credential. But malware does get in still. And so the real key there is stopping the spread, and that's what Guardicore does. And so now I think it's really nice because you stopped the ransomware with Guardicore, but we've got the whole package and whole solution now.
And I think that's really unique in the marketplace and very exciting. Thanks a lot and good evening everyone. I have two questions as well. The first one, I was hoping to talk about. As I look at the midpoint of your guide for December, is there a way to think about how are you thinking about seasonality in edge and security.
And the bottom really trying to get to is the security numbers may imply a much more severe deceleration on what people are modeling. So I just love to understand how you're assuming those two segments stacking up in the December quarter. Yes, sure. So I'll take that. So we'll start with the edge. Obviously, Edge is quite a busy quarter in Q4. As I talked about, you have seasonality from e-commerce.
I think it's obviously a tougher quarter to call here with some supply chain disruptions and things like that. Does that drive more or less Internet traffic and what does that holiday season look like. Typically, a very strong media quarter where you see new devices and games coming online devices, consoles, etc.
And then you also have a lot of sporting events in Q4, back-to-school, you've got lots of game releases. So it can be a pretty robust season for us, obviously challenging to call. I kind of looked at the events calendar, it's pretty full. So we provided we can see some good traffic.
You can see good upside we delivered that in the last couple of years. In terms of security, it's not as seasonal. Certainly, there are some bundles we have where there is traffic can impact that a bit. But I think to take our security guidance, we've been pretty conservative in the way that we've approached security, and we've been over delivering every quarter.
I think -- we've had, obviously, Guardicore is off to a good start. So I wouldn't imply that as a seasonal downtick or anything like that in our security growth. I'm curious, is capex coming down because you feel like there's enough capacity you have out there and you can scale it lower?
Or is it more that you just can't get your hands on the supply chain and the products you need to drive capex. I'm just trying to understand what's taking capex lower? And then how do I think about this as we go into ? So I would say it's good execution. And if anything, with the supply chain, we're not seeing supply chain disruptions in terms of the fact that actually, if you remember a few calls ago, we talked about in the pandemic, we took capex up, and we were pretty cautious in terms of making sure that we had plenty of extra capacity available if we see the pandemic continue and see traffic grow, etc..
So we leaned in. We built up our inventory a bit. We bought a lot of small equipment. So that we're not concerned right now anyway with the supply chain. So I'd say that's part of what's driving it is we built out ahead of demand.
We're pretty smart in the way we did that. But also, I mentioned there's a number of capex efficiencies that Adam and his team are working on, not only just software but network design, deployment optimization, looking at different hardware improvements and just any way to drive a big focus on lowering our need for capex. And also keep in mind, we have great relationships with the networks and ISPs.
So in terms of doing optimizations inside of their networks, we're able to do that as well. So I'd say it's really a great execution on the team's part and capex has come down pretty significantly.
You see that in our free cash flow results. I'm sorry, does that sustain next year, like this mid-teens capex as a personnel sales? Is that the right year to model this out?
So I mean, right now, if I must, you see another pandemic or some major events, and we see some crazy unexpected traffic growth. Yes, I think it's a sustainable number certainly going into next year. I don't want to get into giving guidance.
But I think that I've talked about in the past that we'd be getting back to this level, and we're actually operating a little bit better than that. Hey guys. Thanks so much for taking my questions. And nice to see security growth hold up and actually accelerate this quarter.
Two questions. First, I wanted to go a little bit deeper on the supply chain issues. I appreciate you've obviously overinvested capacity with the OTT launches and the pandemic last year. You seem pretty well insulated from the rising cost. But at what point that this continues dragging out? Does it begin to become a worry and you might have to overspend in order to keep capacity and not have to turn away business? And maybe related to that, as we think about the environment heading into Q4, how do we expect that to shake out, especially given Q4 is such a traditionally such a strong commerce season?
A lot of companies are telling us, they're not going to be able to meet demand, especially when it comes to electronic goods. So is that a worry that you have? And maybe how are you thinking about embedding that in your guidance? I just mentioned on the last question that it's hard to predict what the commerce season looks like. And obviously, when you're in the business of delivering Internet traffic, one model could suggest that while shells are not stock, people are doing more surfing to find things.
Another model would suggest that there's not as much shopping and people are giving cash and gift cards. So hard to tell, but we did put out a pretty big range there.
Also keep in mind that a lot of our commerce customers, about half of our commerce customers have taken, we call our zero overage. So you've kind of flattened out that bursting. So the burst thing for commerce is not as big of an impact, Q4 still has an impact. In terms of the device cycle, that's an interesting one. We do expect and we've seen over the last several years, especially in the last couple of weeks of the year as new devices come online, there's a lot of firmware updates and things like that.
I still expect to see that. But there's other things that are not as dependent on that, for example, gaming releases, new video content that comes out if you don't have a new machine, you're watching it on your old machines. So I still think that we'll have a pretty big immediate quarter for sure. But that's why I've given a pretty wide range to try to take those things into consideration.
And then on your supply chain question, you had asked about when does this become a problem. It's funny, I asked the same questions to my team as we go through our capex build-out. We've done a nice job of building out several quarters' worth of inventory here.
And we've diversified our supply chain, and the team has done a good job of ensuring that we're not seeing any significant increase in pricing or anything like that.
A little bit on the freight side, but it's not really material, and I think that should start to work itself out. But if we do see another massive growth in traffic, maybe we start to run into some problems. But so far, so good. And like I said, the team did a really good job preparing not expecting this type of a disruption in the supply chain, but expecting that the result from the pandemic would last a lot longer. So we did some scenario planning. So we're in pretty good shape at the moment.
So I think one thing to keep in mind, Alex, is you've got the anniversary of Asia, your growth rate lapse in Q4 for [inaudible] and then we also got in Guardicore. We obviously did much better this year than we expected going into the year. Security has overperformed every single quarter. So I think if you're taking the super low end of the range, maybe you could come up with that formula, but we're expecting pretty solid growth here with security in Q4. Let me just add, our strategy in security is to combine organic development with intelligent and timely acquisitions, and we'll continue to do that.
And of course, when you buy a company after a year, its growth becomes organic. And it's no longer counted as an acquisition growth per se. And I think we've had a really great track record of doing that in security. Going back all the way to the Prolexic acquisition in And as I mentioned, I think Guardicore fundamentally like that in terms of really transforming our enterprise security business just like Prolexic transformed our DDoS business, which, of course, today is very, very successful.
We're the market leader by far. And our goal is to do that on the enterprise security side for things like stopping ransomware and stopping malware. And as Ed said, as we continue to want to grow our security business over the longer term at plus percent, that will include acquisitions. And I think acquisitions are a good thing. It gives you a jump start on technology in an important area.
Guardicore has been working for a long time to develop their micro segmentation approach. I believe it is a market being in what they do, they're the best folks out there. And now we have the benefit of all of the users of effort that they put into that at a perfect time because a lot of companies are rightly worried about stopping ransomware, and now Akamai is in a position to help them do that.
And of course, it fits with a lot of our organic development on technology around EA is an ideal combination. So we'll continue to do both and working hard to continue our security growth at plus percent.
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