Akamai Technologies, Inc. has entered an agreement to buy private-owned Linode for $900 million.
Linode is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider, based in the US. Founded in 2003, the company offers a range of services, but is especially popular for its Linux-powered virtual machines. The company competes in the same market as much larger companies, such as Microsoft, AWS and Google.
Linode sees the acquisition as the best way for it to continue to scale and widen its reach.
“When we started to look at our long term roadmap and how to deliver the best possible customer experience, we knew it would require more — more network, more security, more scale,” writes Linode founder and CEO Christopher Aker. “Those are things Akamai does better than anyone. Applications and data are increasingly pushing out to the edge where you need a wider span of resiliency, reach, low latency, and security. Combining the things Akamai does well with the things Linode does well brings these together under one roof at massive scale, creating the world’s most distributed compute platform — from core to edge.”
For its part, Akamai sees the acquisition as a way to become “world’s most distributed compute platform,” thanks to Linode’s solid reputation for making cloud computing easy for just about everyone.
“The opportunity to combine Linode’s developer-friendly cloud computing capabilities with Akamai’s market-leading edge platform and security services is transformational for Akamai,” said Dr. Tom Leighton, chief executive officer and co-founder, Akamai Technologies. “Akamai has been a pioneer in the edge computing business for over 20 years, and today we are excited to begin a new chapter in our evolution by creating a unique cloud platform to build, run and secure applications from the cloud to the edge. This a big win for developers who will now be able to build applications on a platform that delivers unprecedented scale, reach, performance, reliability and security.”
Akamai is already the 800-lb gorilla in the CDN market. The the Linode acquisition will only help the company become even more formidable.
The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022.