Akamai: Backbone of the Internet
It's high time for me to put in a good word for Akamai Technologies (AKAM:Nsdq). Akamai's business services a serious and vital necessity of life on the internet today. This is a company without which we wouldn't have streaming video content or be able to have seamless internet service. It hosts the infrastructural network architecture and security backbone of the internet; the product it delivers is better than television, and might in the future actually deliver streaming content online from networks, called "over the top" or OTT.
It's a company with great potential that has a history of rolling out streaming services on the internet, delivering a fast user experience, and making the internet better for everyone. It delivers higher quality, lower cost, and better performance than its weak competitors, doesn't face fast-lane regulatory scrutiny for this reason, and has strong propspects for the future. Scale, cost, and quality are important to the company, according to the founding CEO Tom Leighton.
With strong leadership, proven history of technical and corporate expertise, and an elite work force, Akamai rolled out streaming video beginnning in the late nineties and 2000s. It owns important servers and key patents many other companies would kill to have and the product it delivers offers consumers greater detail than television.
Akamai has lots of unique agreements with other companies, posts huge goodwill numbers, and hosts fake versions of many government websites to safeguard national security. For example, if Sony had been a customer of Akamai, it couldn't have been hacked by the North Koreans.
Akamai's stock price flew up to around $400 in 2001, and made a sharp drop when it was caught in the tailwind of the down draft that plunged most tech stocks off the cliff, but it didn't deserve to fall in tandem and shouldn't have. Isn't it time for common sense and basic know-how to prevail and return to tech valuations?
My point is that Akamai is worth much more than facebook, which is a stock that can be duplicated in many foreign countries such as China and Russia, whereas Akamai is unique. While facebook may be a leader in personal communications, arguably as pioneering as a magazine in its own way, facebook is a website that not everyone likes or uses, and for all its lofty valuation does have competition from mainstream and internet news services: Skype, Twitter, Pinterest, Craigslist, reddit, Instagram, Snapchat, and other constantly proliferating and mutating website services competing for everyone's attention.
Facebook, for example, isn't as integral or essential to the backbone of the internet as Akamai is, so why isn't Akamai valued a lot higher? By the way, I'm also a huge fan of facebook, as I am of many of its social media competitors. But in my mind Akamai is unique. There's nothing else anything like this company with the name that means witty or intelligent in Hawaiian. Without it, facebook and all the others might not exist. Everyone uses Akamai, like they use electricity and water. For more about Akamai, this video and this older one show founding CEO Tom Leighton, who was on CNBC yesterday.