Developing a platform strategy for Akamai Cloudlet applications

Akamai, a high tech company based in Cambridge Massachusetts, is a market leader in global Content Delivery Network (CDN) industry. To fully leverage opportunities and also tackle challenges in market, the company has been keeping innovating new products and providing new services to keep existing customers while attracting new ones. One of company's strategic plans is to extend company's current products and services into an industry platform, such that Akamai can leverage other companies' resources to better serve broader customer base to achieve sustainable growth. One product identified by the company that has the potential to be extended into industry platform is called Cloudlet. Cloudlet is a series of new applications launched by Akamai in 2014. Those applications aim to solve business and operational challenges that customers have but do not belong to traditional CDN services. The research topic of this thesis is to develop platform strategies that could extend Cloudlet into a platform. To achieve this goal, the writer started with reviewing related literatures and identified existing frameworks to conduct systematic analysis on challenges the company may encounter in different aspects. Also, the writer gained first hand experience by working in Cloudlet product management team and initiated a series of interviews with different stakeholders inside the company for different perspectives. Also the writer has conducted two case studies regarding successful cloud services to identify best practices that Cloudlet team inside Akamai can leverage. Finally, a list of strategic actions is proposed for Cloudlet platform transformation with analysis on how these actions can best attract customers and motivate stakeholders internally and externally.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Jiang, Ming

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/1721.1/100378

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/100378