India is a technology-driven market with several trends playing out, like being mobile-first, driven by AI and IoT, making it an important market for the company.
Content delivery network provider Akamai said India was among its fastest growing markets globally, with the centre of excellence (CoE ) here being the largest among the three it operates worldwide.
The CoE has grown rapidly in the last few years, going from 350 employees in 2019 to over 2,000 at present, Prasad Mandava, managing director and vice president-engineering at Akamai India, told ET. The company has about 8,200 employees globally.
“The India centre leads the centres of excellence in innovation and is very strong on operations too. For any international company like Akamai, India is a very significant growth market,” he said.
India is a technology-driven market with several trends playing out, like being mobile-first, driven by AI and IoT, making it an important market for the company.
Akamai currently partners over 250 companies in India across sectors including media and entertainment, ecommerce, manufacturing and banking and financial services. Globally, Asia is growing rapidly for Akamai, and within that, India plays a significant role, Mandava said.
While the core business remains content delivery, the company is seeing demand rise rapidly for its security solutions, which globally is a $1 billion business now.
With the pandemic and everyone working remotely, the demand for security solutions from enterprises has increased. As per the recent quarterly numbers, while the overall business grew at 5%, security has grown at about 25% year-on-year.
The India CoE is leading product development and innovation across different areas for Akamai.
“We see product innovation going on in security, media delivery and data experience for our customers, out of here,” said Mandava, adding that India was a microcosm of what is happening at Akamai globally.
The company runs an innovation and incubation programme out of here for all of Asia where it works to quickly convert customer-driven solutions to a proof of concept before rolling it out within the company. It also runs a startup collaboration programme where it does proof of concepts with startups to create solutions.
Going ahead, the company will invest more into research around areas like zero trust in cybersecurity as well as data experience for customers and increasing the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning across its products.
https://cio.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/corporate-news/india-among-fastest-growing-markets-for-akamai/85418908
