Akamai technologies : an analysis of product and platform growth strategies

Akamai Technologies has achieved market leadership in content delivery and application acceleration services and is pursuing aggressive growth. Akamai has advised the market that growth to $5B by 2020 is achievable by exploiting opportunity within its key markets. However, the internal consensus is that Akamai's legacy business practices are incapable of scaling at the rate of market growth. What must Akamai do to execute on its revenue goals and, more broadly, how can Akamai maintain a leadership position within a dynamic and rapidly expanding market? The goal of this thesis is to discover the elements of Akamai's legacy and emerging growth strategies and to identify strategic options that Akamai may pursue. To gain perspective into evolution of the business and the rationale for current strategic initiatives, a series of interviews with Akamai managers was conducted and a review of an Akamai case study and corporate quarterly earnings was completed. This information yielded insights on the challenges of growth, actions for overcoming these challenges, and motivations for selecting those actions. To gain insight into best practices in growth strategy, a survey of the business strategy literature and case studies of successful technology platform companies was conducted. The literature differentiated between product-based business strategies and platform-based business strategies. Analysis of the differences between these strategies provided insights into Akamai's current challenges.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Piper, Victor L. (Victor Lawrence)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Michael Cusumano.

• Engineering Systems Division.
• System Design and Management Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/90700

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/90700