SM: This is a really big problem. How close to the last mile can you get? You are going to need millions of servers to cover the world. TL: I don’t think so. The way we think, a server can serve a gigabit a second. It is pretty economical. If you look at TV quality,
SM: So, you are saying that centralized data centers have higher latency, and thus lower throughput, and that prevents TV quality video or higher, making the video-on-demand experience unsatisfactory. Is there an example of this you could give? I think it would be helpful to illustrate the point. TL: We have a great case study
SM: Let’s take that question and apply it to all these recent media reactions you are getting about Level 3’s announcement that CDN is going to be a commodity and all these telcos are going to provide CDNs. [My previous coverage here.] TL: I think the Telcos have always provided CDN. There has been no
SM: You are saying that the middle does not have a business model supporting it. The first mile and last mile have business models, but the middle does not. TL: Right. The middle mile is where you get into a lot of problems with the Internet. It is because there is no money flowing in
SM: Let me ask you a couple of detailed questions on that framework. You have servers inside of various ISPs. The intelligence in that server is your technology and that is how you route traffic. Is that fair to say? TL: At a very high level that is correct. There is a lot of detail
SM: Even though you had entered the 50K competition, and had started talking to potential customers, Akamai was not a company yet? TL: We really had no desire to make a company out of our research. We were all academics and we liked writing papers, proving theorems, and giving talks. We were not businessmen in
Tom Leighton, co-founder of Akamai, is the Chief Scientist and a member of the Board of Director at Akamai. You can read more about him by visiting his bio here. Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) is the leading content delivery network (CDN) provider which, among other things, allows content providers to accelerate the delivery of Internet
SM: The big opportunity that I felt Palm missed out on was on the software side. There was a huge opportunity for enterprise integration. RIM was very good with the email, but that was it. They didn’t push it any further. Palm had good implementation of the Windows OS, and they could have gone in