Opportunity in India is massive as it is a developer heavy market: Akamai’s Sidharth Pisharoti

Chennai: Since India is a developer heavy market, digital experiences provider Akamai Technologies said it sees massive potential for the company’s growth in the country, especially post the Nasdaq-listed cloud company completed the acquisition of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform provider Linode for approximately $900 million last week. Akamai said that with Linode, it will become a distributed compute platform, from cloud to edge.

“Akamai has traditionally been more on enterprise selling so Linode’s self-serviceability, ease of use and adoption, will help us significantly in a market like India because we are a developer heavy market,” Sidharth Pisharoti, regional vice president at Akamai Technologies told ET.

He said the reason is that most developers like the self-serviceability, without any human interaction. The opportunity is immense because there is applicability across industries as every customer or every prospect of the company uses cloud in some shape or form and this includes the public sector which is now starting to use cloud offerings, Pisharoti said.

Akamai said it has large customers in India and across the globe who are publishers, enterprises, OTT companies, banks and more. He said all of these companies have started using public cloud and while the degrees of use vary, he said what was definitive was that cloud was here to stay and so the acquisition of Linode was a natural progression to strengthen their play in the space. The synergy would also extend to Akamai tapping Linode’s global and Indian customers to provide them with Akamai’s edge and security offerings.

Linode on its part said that customers today face new challenges as cloud services become all-encompassing, including compute, storage security and delivery from core to edge. It said that solving those challenges requires integration and scale which Akamai and Linode plan to bring together under one roof.

“For Linode our specialty is working with developers, working with the open source community, working with small to medium sized businesses and we’re going to continue to be the experts in that,” Blair Lyon, VP – Cloud Experience, Linode said. “The Linode brand is going to continue but now we have Akamai’s edge compute and security division too.”

He said this acquisition was exciting as it will provide Linode the opportunity to work not just for SMBs, developers and startups, but also for enterprises as Akamai brings with it scale and resources. It allows Linode to get involved in providing end-to-end solutions so one can not only build, host and deploy an application but also have all the storage on Linode as well. “And then you can deliver it to the edge and provide the overlaid security and defense against things like ransomware and others with it with the Akamai security network,” he said.

Lyon went on to add that Linode was gearing up to roll out two products – their bare metal server and its database as a service. So in the short term, he said that the company’s focus would be to fast track these launches and leverage the infrastructure and reach of Akamai to expand its data centers and capacity to look at opportunities to integrate some of their products down the line.

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