Akamai said the deal will be “transformative” for the company, with plans to acquire the competitor from AWS in the first quarter of 2022.
Akamai Technologies has confirmed plans to acquire cloud hosting company Linode in a $900 million deal to become “the world’s most distributed computing 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 employees operating in 11 markets, with customers worldwide.
It presented 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 is no doubt that AWS is the big kahuna in the cloud,” said the website said. “If you are a large enterprise and need the ability to customize your infrastructure, AWS is the ideal solution. But if you’re a small business owner or independent developer, access to all this advanced cloud technology comes at a cost: unnecessary complexity, risk of Amazon’s ecosystem getting bogged down, and frequent billing surprises.
Linode CEO Christopher Aker said today’s customers face new challenges as cloud services become ubiquitous. He added that Linode and Akamai have a “natural synergy” and that their combination of strengths will help customers meet these challenges.
“Linode will soon be able to harness the power of Akamai to deliver entirely new products, services, expertise, locations and scale, while Akamai will be able to leverage Linode’s deep expertise in compute, storage and infrastructure on demand. a service,” Aker said.
Akamai shared its 2021 results yesterday (February 15), reporting revenue of $3.5 billion last year, an increase of 8%. Its content delivery network includes more than 325,000 servers worldwide, and the company also offers cybersecurity and cloud services.
Akamai CEO Dr. Tom Leighton called the acquisition “transformational” for the company, as it will combine Linode’s developer-friendly cloud computing capabilities with the industry-leading platform and services of Akamai security.
“Akamai has been a pioneer in edge computing for more than 20 years, and today we’re excited to open a new chapter in our evolution by creating a single cloud platform to build, run, and secure applications from the cloud to the edge,” says Leighton.
“This is a big win for developers who will now be able to build apps on a platform that offers unprecedented scalability, reach, performance, reliability and security.”
The Massachusetts-based company expects the deal to close in the first quarter of this year.
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