Aidan Daniels

Aidan Daniels inquired about the primary reasons customers choose Akamai over hyperscalers or other competitors for edge compute workloads, beyond just cost.

Answer

CEO Tom Leighton highlighted performance, scale, and generally lower cost as key differentiators. He explained that even hyperscalers utilize Akamai's compute for better performance due to its distributed nature, allowing compute logic to be closer to users, and for enhanced scale, especially for bandwidth-intensive applications like video.

Aidan Daniels asked about the main reasons customers choose Akamai for compute workloads at the edge over hyperscalers or other competitors, seeking additional color beyond cost.

Answer

Tom Leighton (CEO) identified performance, scale, and generally lower cost as key differentiators. He cited hyperscalers using Akamai's compute not for cost savings but for better performance due to Akamai's ability to run logic in more locations, closer to users, and for better scale, especially for bandwidth-intensive video. For other customers, substantial cost savings are a factor when moving from major cloud providers to Akamai, as demonstrated by Akamai's own migration of applications to its cloud.