Recently in Conferences & Events Category

Experts from Akamai's Media & Entertainment team will be participating in a host of conference panels, partner workshops and in-booth presentations during the 2015 NAB Show in Las Vegas.

If the industry had stuck with "Ultra High Definition" as the generic label for 4K video resolution, chances are pretty good that we wouldn't be doing road races during major tradeshows. But with 4K becoming a generally accepted term, it was practically an obligation that somebody came up with a way to tie it into a run.

On Tuesday, February 24th, Akamai had the honor of being a sponsor at the inaugural Lead On: Silicon Valley Conference For Women. 5,000 women attended the event, which featured big name keynote speakers including, Diane Von Furstenberg, Candy Chang, Kara Swisher, Brene Brown and Hillary Clinton, along with two speakers from Akamai - Susan LaPointe (Vice President of Human Resource Operations), and myself! 

Akamai Edge 2014 may have wrapped up last week, but it's all we can think about! We had such a great time with all of you in Miami, and we hope you had a great time with us as well. With over 1,500 attendees, it was our largest Akamai Edge yet. Ready to relive a little bit of it? Check out our social story! What was your favorite part of the conference? Let us know by tweeting to us using the hashtag #AkamaiEdge. 

"Stand still at your own risk."

The warning from Cheryl Ainoa of Intuit stood starkly on the MainStage screen at the Velocity Conference 2014 in Santa Clara, California. Not an uncommon warning of course - certainly not anything that those in the audience had not heard before. But what followed, advice from a company that has itself survived several significant market disruptions since the 80s was both valuable and actionable.

Tl;dr version: Last week at the Velocity Conference I saw a 7 year old girl (and her father) make a presentation and get a standing ovation. 

If you follow us on Twitter, you may have noticed that we were live tweeting at the NAB Conference in Las Vegas this past week. There was plenty going on, and 98,000 people attending from 150 different countries. Weren't able to make it out to Las Vegas this year? We've compiled all of our tweets from this past week, to get you up to date on what was talked about at NAB this year. Read our Twitter stream to follow the events and talks over the past week. Enjoy!

As you might have already read, we were at RSA Conference in San Francisco last week. For the first time, I had the opportunity to live-tweet the entire conference: from William Shatner's musical opening, to Andy Ellis', Or Katz's and Tsvika Klein's talks, to Stephen Colbert's closing keynote. Did you miss RSA Conference this year? Read our Twitter stream to follow the various talks and events from each day. Enjoy!

"The future of the Internet lies on the hands of developers and architects."

While this statement sounds really great, I can't take the credit for it. The original quote comes from Tom Leighton himself, co-founder and CEO of Akamai, in a video introducing Akamai {OPEN}, part of the Akamai Open Platform Initiative.



Akamai has become one of the most reliable and popular web platforms, handling up to 30 percent of total web traffic on any given day. What that means is that virtually every user in the word surfing the web is at some point helped by Akamai to improve and secure the Internet experience. And, this kind of insight really puts the Akamai Intelligent Platform in a unique position for helping companies to gain better understanding and control over their business.

At the same time, as Tom says, the future of the Internet will be driven by those who create things; those who understand market needs; and those who create applications to address these needs and tackle problems.

And because of this, we needed to answer two important questions:

"How can we, from this privileged position, fuel the innovation the market is demanding?"

"How can we make sure our customers get the most out of their investment in Akamai while embracing new market trends (if not needs), such as a solid cloud computing strategy?'

As mentioned earlier, today we announced the Akamai Open Platform Initiative. And fundamentally, this new program provides our answer to the previous questions. Akamai has worked intensively to extend the capacities of the platform, so developers, partners and customers can take more control of their interaction with the Akamai Intelligent Platform, multiplying the reach and scope of their applications.

This, again, sounds great. But you may be wondering what does it effectively mean? Or more simply put, what would I say if I were talking to you over a cup of coffee (apart of eventually asking you to take the bill). Let's slice and dice this strategy.

The Open Platform Initiative is, ultimately, a new way for not only to our customer, but also a wide community of developers to interact with Akamai. We work tirelessly to create better services every day and this initiative is all about giving developers, customers and partners greater freedom in the way these services are consumed. We have opened up our core technology,granting more insight and more control through program elements including:

• A developer website (developer.akamai.com) where we are exposing APIs so Akamai services can be consumed, edited and monitored programmatically. The great thing is that it enables developers to integrate Akamai services with other technologies.

• A newly designed Luna Control Center customer portal providing greater self-serviceability. For example, Property Manager is a new tool that allows customers to fully edit, control and manage the behavior of Akamai Intelligent Platform™ in relation to their sites and applications. And even though I call myself a fan, it seems that I am not the only one. We are observing great customer adoption both in frequency and intensity of use. We've also added capabilities such as Predictive and Intelligent Alerts, support for Single Sign On and simplified User Management (the ability to drag and drop widgets to personalize your view of Akamai assets) as part of the Open Platform Initiative.

• A significant group of Integration Services that range from providing real time access to relevant big cloud data to executing customer's business workflow tasks -- all of which can be integrated with third-party technologies to create a wider scope of applications.

I like to say that the Akamai Open Platform Initiative is part of the process of 'cloudifying' Akamai. While this word may sound a bit weird, we are used to hearing that a particular site, one which kept performing smoothly even during an attack did so because it was 'akamaized', right?

Never more true than today, you have the power of Akamai, and then, potentially, the next big thing in the Internet, at your fingertips.

Miguel Serrano Palacio is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Akamai