Akamai Follows VeriSign's Lead
A little over a year ago, VeriSign acquired Kontiki - the market leader in legitimate, secure peer to peer technology for rich media content. As you can imagine, we looked at every legitimate P2P technology platform on the market before we made the move.
We've since taken the Kontiki platform and embedded it in our global network to provide complete broadband and mobile content delivery worldwide. The VeriSign/Kontiki platform - now known as VeriSign's Intelligent CDN - combined with our mobile assets picked up through M-Qube, 3United and Lightsurf, now has more than 30 million P2P clients in the market (all secure, legitimate and DRM-enabled, mind you), handles more than 6 billion text messages per month (including the interactive voting for American Idol, Deal or No Deal and 7 of the other top 10 shows on tv) and continues to power the market's leading long-form content sites - BBC, Sky, AOL and Channel 4.
Yesterday's acquisition of Red Swoosh by Akamai was tremendous validation of the strategy we embarked on a year ago. And of course, we believe Red Swoosh has good technology, but it's no Kontiki :) For more on this, see Dan Rayburn's StreamingMedia.com post.
It's also ironic that the acquisition was announced the same week Forbes put Akamai on the cover, with a quote from CEO Sagan inside that continues the company's historically negative view of P2P technology.
As another blogger said this morning - "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!"
