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Speaker 1: Akamai shares today, somewhat volatile after posting second quarter results
Speaker 1: that across the board in general beat estimates. But you
Speaker 1: have to read between the lines as to where there
Speaker 1: was perhaps a bit of a pullback or a miss
Speaker 1: when it came to compute, for example, but there fully
Speaker 1: forecast that was raised. Tom Layton, Akami CEO, joins us
Speaker 1: now to demiss the five for us, Tom, because it's interesting.
Speaker 1: You have Paybisana here really talking about lots of moving
Speaker 1: parts and ultimately they see fairly cloudy still of what
Speaker 1: the ultimate positioning is of the business. Can you tell
Speaker 1: it you're really going in on well, cloud infrastructure here,
Speaker 1: not just content delivery, not just security.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, security majority of our revenue cloud infrastructure services.
Speaker 2: My goodness. We were up thirty percent year every year,
Speaker 2: and we think that's going to accelerate. So by the
Speaker 2: end of this year will be up forty percent plus
Speaker 2: year over year. Tremendous market opportunity there, strong tailwinds of
Speaker 2: course from jen Ai. So I think very exciting results
Speaker 2: for Akamai. You know, a strong beat on the quarter,
Speaker 2: very profitable earnings, per share up nine percent and a
Speaker 2: dollar and seventy three cents, and I think a very
Speaker 2: good outlook, raising guidance for the year.
Speaker 1: So maybe just a little bit of a pause for investors.
Speaker 1: I mean, the shads are still down over the year
Speaker 1: or twelve months. Tom, I'm sort of interested therefore, on
Speaker 1: what they're not getting. What is it about the opportunity
Speaker 1: in for example, cloud infrastructure. Why take on the hyperscals.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a tremendous market opportunity. Our customers have asked
Speaker 2: us to do that. You know, we with our distributed platform,
Speaker 2: which is unique in the marketplace. We're in seven hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty cities. With our points of presence, we can
Speaker 2: get enterprise computer instances. They're containers closer to the end users,
Speaker 2: and that gives you lower latency and better performance and
Speaker 2: for a lot of applications that matters. Also we could
Speaker 2: do it at a lower price point. In fact, one
Speaker 2: of the hyperscalers is an early adopter of our new
Speaker 2: managed container service. They want to have their compute instances
Speaker 2: and hundreds of cities around the world, which is something
Speaker 2: Allly Akamai can do.
Speaker 1: Interesting. I mean, maybe people are looking at what drove
Speaker 1: some of the revenue beat and they're looking at FX,
Speaker 1: but they're also looking at TikTok inclusion. Have you decided
Speaker 1: that the risk of being band is just off the
Speaker 1: table and you're going to really be starting talking about
Speaker 1: this client once again?
Speaker 2: Oh, there's always risk, though it seems that from what
Speaker 2: we're hearing from public sources that you know, a deal
Speaker 2: has basically been structured, and you know, there's obviously caught
Speaker 2: up in trade negotiations, but at this point it seems
Speaker 2: like the ban has been postponed several times and so
Speaker 2: we're not seeing anything that suggests that that's going to
Speaker 2: change in the near future.
Speaker 1: You do that content delivery for them. It's interesting that
Speaker 1: security is where a lot of your growth and as
Speaker 1: you say, the most part of your revenue has been
Speaker 1: coming from. What insecurity is driving that growth? Where are
Speaker 1: people coming to you?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we have the market leading solutions for web apt firewall,
Speaker 2: for bought management, for API security, for stopping ransomware with segmentation,
Speaker 2: and of course the attack rates have been going way up,
Speaker 2: the penetrations have been going way up, and we have
Speaker 2: the solution. It stops the damage caused by those attacks.
Speaker 2: So if the ransomware gets in, we identify it quickly,
Speaker 2: we don't let it spread, and that protects our customers
Speaker 2: so they don't have these huge costs associated with being
Speaker 2: shut down by ransomware.
Speaker 1: Of course, Jeneral to AI in many ways, making the
Speaker 1: field of security ever more evolving and nimble is what's crucial. Tom.
Speaker 1: What I'm also so interested in is the way in
Speaker 1: which you're thinking about education here in the United States,
Speaker 1: skills in particular and upskilling. This is something that the
Speaker 1: US government is calling for a lot, and I'm particularly
Speaker 1: in the era of Generator Ai. How are you seeing
Speaker 1: the skill set and the pool of talent? Is it
Speaker 1: good enough for you?
Speaker 2: It's going to change with Jenai. We're seeing tremendous efficiencies
Speaker 2: across most job types at Akamai, so that our employees
Speaker 2: can do more in the same amount of time by
Speaker 2: leveraging Genai. And I think you'll see training. We're doing
Speaker 2: training ourselves so that employees will change maybe how they
Speaker 2: do certain things, and they'll be more efficient by learning
Speaker 2: how to use the Genai tools. I think it's really
Speaker 2: very exciting and it probably is going to be a
Speaker 2: sea change over time and education.
Speaker 1: Tom Layton a Akamai is always great to have you
Speaker 1: on after your numbers. Thank you very much for joining
Speaker 1: the show.