Akamai Technologies Inc, the company established by a group of MIT scientists with a fault-tolerant network for distributing web content has appointed George Conrades as its new chairman and CEO (01/15/99). Conrades joined the board of Akamai in December 1998 via his position at Polaris Venture Partners, one the main investors in Akamai.
Conrades will work full time for an indefinite period, but the company acknowledges that at some point he will return to Polaris. The CEO position at the company was vacant until now. Akamai has raised just $8m so far, but says it is in the process of closing its second round at the moment, but it will not say how much it intends to raise or when the round will close. Conrades was previously CEO of internet pioneer BBN Corp from 1994, and when GTE Corp acquired it in 1997, he continued working there before leaving last year. Prior to that Conrades spent 31 years at IBM, starting as a salesman and rising to head IBM in the US.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts company says it has 10 beta testers of its technology, which is based on an algorithm called FreeFlow. The company has placed 400 servers on 10 ISP networks, positioned right at the edge of their networks – the idea being that the first thing the user comes across when getting web content is Akamai’s servers, thus speeding the delivery.
It says five of the beta testers are in the top 10 web sites in terms of the number of visitors. The technology apparently arose from a water cooler conversation three years ago at MIT between Tim Berners-Lee and Akamai’s chief scientist, Frank Leighton, so the story goes. Leighton, a math professor, formed a research team at MIT to develop the patent-pending mathematical algorithms that comprise FreeFlow and manage the balance and delivery of the web content.
