Akamai Turns 10

Content delivery pioneer Akamai Technologies (AKAM) is celebrating the company's 10th anniversary today, and has published a Netrospective that highlights many of the major Internet traffic milestones over the past decade, from the famed Victoria's Secret Web traffic jam in 1999 right through the recent Middle East cable cuts.

Akamai's infrastructure has grown to the point where it has 30,000 servers in 70 countries within nearly 1,000 networks. The company estimates that 85 percent of the world's Internet users are within a single "network hop" of an Akamai server. That infrastructure serves more than 300 billion requests per day, according to a company fact sheet.

"We have stayed true to the original vision of Akamai's founders, who set out to change the Internet forever, and they did just that," said Paul Sagan, president and chief executive officer of Akamai. "Akamai built the world's largest distributed, highly-redundant system for massive parallel computing, and every day it supports the online business of thousands of the world's leading brands, across most major industries. Our approach remains highly differentiated, as Akamai provides the only end-to-end managed service for powering rich media, dynamic transactions, and Web- and IP-based applications."

Akamai also announced its first global users conference, which will be held August 18-20 in Boston at the Renaissance Waterfront Hotel.