Parimal Pandya (Akamai)
Akamai Technologies is celebrating its 20-year anniversary in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) and has highlighted its expansion plans for the region with new sites and acquisitions in the pipeline.
Marking its 25th global anniversary, the cloud vendor is currently building new facilities in Jakarta, Chennai, Osaka and Auckland to “complement existing” sites in Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Mumbai.
According to Akamai, the expansion plans mark its “first major step” to bring together computing, storage, database and other services to continue powering its distributed edge network that currently spans 4,100 locations across 130 countries.
The aggressive APJ strategy is driven by growing customer demand for cloud and security solutions, which also motivated its partner program update this year.
The program refresh includes benefits and incentives aimed at enabling the growth of its channel network, as the vendor counts partners “essential to Akamai’s continued growth”, shared Paul Joseph, Akamai’s executive vice president of global sales and services.
Currently, Akamai has a presence in 14 countries across APJ and works with 150 partners in the region.
In the past year alone, the vendor formed strategic alliances with the likes of Fujitsu and Wangsu in China and built on existing partnerships with Telstra in Australia, Telin in Indonesia, NTT in India and CTC in Japan.
Akamai shared that it has plans to grow its channel network in APJ as it continues to target sectors such as financial services, media and entertainment, broadcast, public sector, higher education, hospitality, travel, retail, games publishers and start-ups.
In addition, the vendor secured strategic acquisitions of StackPath, Neosec, Ondat, Linode and Guardicore to boost its technology stack across cloud computing, security and content delivery, and hinted that it will continue on a similar path to meet customer needs.
“Our goal is to empower businesses to better control their costs in areas like cloud and build and deploy solutions that help them achieve and maintain customer excellence to drive profitable growth,” said Parimal Pandya, vice president of Sales and managing director of Akamai APJ.
“Akamai’s agility to meet changing market conditions is a testament to our ability to continuously innovate and stay relevant to customers. As we celebrate 20 years of Akamai in APJ, we are excited to usher in a new era of technology and are ready to solve the biggest business challenges facing our customers so they can successfully navigate economic and other roadblocks in future.”
