Akamai Technologies sees potential for PHL business
US-BASED Akamai Technologies, Inc., which claims to be the world’s largest and most trusted cloud delivery platform, sees strong potential for its business in the Philippines as the country’s big businesses go through a digital transformation while smaller ones begin to realize the need to accelerate and secure their online systems.
“This country has a lot of potential,” said Gerald Penaflor, Akamai head of enterprise business in the ASEAN, in a media roundtable discussion in Makati City on Tuesday.
“We have 110 million people over here, 48% of our population are already, one way or the other, part of an online community and about 98% of them are all subscribers of Facebook,” he said.
He said based on how Facebook or Google are positioning themselves in the Philippines, attention is focused on the potential of an emerging country with a big population, many from younger generations, that are online everyday.
“So that’s why the potential definitely is much much more bigger compared to other countries,” he added.
Fernando Serto, Akamai head of security strategy in the AsiaPacific, said the company started operating in the Philippines about three years ago with a few servers that have since expanded to more than 800 as of the last count.
“So it’s a very rich market for us from a target perspective. The last two years have been amazing for us in the Philippines, but we haven’t even scratched the surface yet,” he said.
Aside from its servers, Akamai’s footprint in the Philippines is seen in its presence in 16 data centers across the country. It is also co-located with six Internet service providers locally.
Around the world, the company has more than 7,600 employees and has deployed a content delivery network with more than 240,000 servers in at least 130 countries and within at least 1,700 networks.
Incorporated in 1998, Akamai closed 2017 with annual revenues of $ 2.5 billion, up 7% year- onyear using figures adjusted for foreign exchange.
The two Akamai officials said the need for the company’s services is borne out of threats from bot- based abuse that targets the hospitality industry and advanced distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
In its study, the company said cyberattack trends for the six months from November 2017 to April 2018 show the importance of maintaining agility not only for security teams, but also for developers, network operators and service providers in order to mitigate new threats.
In the Philippines, Mr. Penaflor said the company is “very excited” about its plans for the future as the government, the banking sector, universities and homegrown e- commerce sites undergo an online transformation.
E- commerce, for instance, presents big prospects as companies in the sector have grown in neighboring countries such as Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, he said.
“In the Philippines, we don’t have [that] yet. Most of them are coming from regional players. So it’s just a matter of time until we start developing these services for Filipinos,” he said.
Mr. Penaflor said Akamai had tweaked its local offers to include services for small and medium enterprises, which are also embarking into their digital transformation.
“We need to make sure that we have a price point that they can leverage and they can afford,” he said, referring to small hospitals, rural banks and small e-commerce sites.
He said the company made a study on what is affordable for small companies that pay for a speed of, say, 100 megabits per second to arrive at what makes sense for them.
“We make it a point that the services that they get from Akamai is affordable to be able to bundle with the internet gateway that they have,” the official said.