Akamai phenomenon
Last few years the company had innovated very little and a lot of good engineers has left the company. Most of them just got bored of not being challenged .There have been so much burocracy that one can not commit simple code change for few days or sometime even weeks. Despite of all this stagnation company stock is rising, how is that even possible?
I was under the impression that a ton of CDN providers were cropping up, and the moment anyone actually got big they just started their own CDN. Is it your experience that other companies are using Akamai only temporarily until they can replace them with an internally developed CDN?
Yup, totally agree. Netflix has open connect, fb has its own, eventually big N will build their own . It's no longer as difficult as it used to be. Nginx has the necessary features. From a startup perspective akamai is too expensive, they usually go with fastly,cloudfront,clodflare which are way easy to configure and are suitable for 90% of the use case. Akamai will be surviving solely based on security in a few years
Yo. How do y’all afford that new building?
Wall Street still doesn't really understand the nuts and bolts of technology. Listen to any earnings call and the questions investors ask...they are completely clueless. They could ask anything and they never have the pointed, good questions they should and could ask.
Two things that Wall Street looks at - a) are you growing in revenue YoY? (Yes Akamai is) and b) are you keeping your operating expenses under control ? (Yes, Akamai is)
CISOs are very risk-averse and prefer products they know to new products from startups. So Akamai has a niche and a loyal client base. That’s why most startups in security space are struggling to get profits fast. Even the most successful ones are not growing with a speed of FB despite market demand.
The security business is growing. Wall Street sees that potential I believe, but in the long term no innovation equals death
The question is how would you innovate? Machine learning have been used in cyber for years before it was called ML and AI. Symantec has not been innovating for years, and they still hold the largest market share. Security market is driven by cyber criminals, and they mostly innovate in social engineering space now, so the largest innovation you can make is find a cure from human stupidity.
Being a cloud company way before the advent of cloud era, akamai could have innovated a lot in terms of diversification. Maybe symantec is just one which pulled it off. But there are 100s failed once which didn't do that. And engineers don't do well with legacy products.
You can build or buy innovation. That's product development 101.
Who cares about engineers and coding on Wall Street ... its all about money and future profits they get by holding stocks
Stock market doesn’t care about your job satisfaction. Is the company profitable?
It is profitable but it doesn't innovate and competition is rising, few successful CDN startups keep taking businesses from us, yet stock is rising :)
In the last five years it went from 60 to 90. That’s not a lot compared to many other tech stocks.