Not every company has that cool “we started out of a garage” story, but for Akamai (News - Alert) not only is the company’s origin cool, but it shows just what can come out of a little hard work at a higher education facility.

That’s because Akamai – a company that is now revered as the leading global service provider for accelerating content and business processes online – was founded out of the math department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT (News - Alert)) 14 years ago. In 1995, the World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee challenged those at MIT to invent a new and better way to deliver Internet content – a way that was not riddled with congestion. What resulted was a group of professors, grad students and other top researchers and scientists who developed mathematical algorithms necessary to handle the dynamic routing of content. And by 1999, these computer scientist founded Akamai, a company that dedicates itself to ending “World Wide Wait” through intelligent Internet content delivery.

“What’s interesting about the heritage of Akamai is that that fundamental principle idea of making the Internet faster, more reliable, more scalable and more secure is the same big idea that carries us forward 14 years later,” Neil Cohen, vice president of global product marketing at Akamai, told TMCnet at Cloud Expo East 2012 last week in New York. “What is different are all the business models that are shifting to the Web.”

“Now it’s about cloud computing and cloud computing is just another example of what Akamai envisioned from the beginning, which is that the Internet is going to be used for things no one thought it would be and Akamai can help,” he added. “We help customers embrace public cloud computing and hybrid clouds. Part of the reason we are here is to explain to customers that there are a bunch of shifts that are happening but overall this change is good because things are moving out to the Internet.”

Akamai's cloud platform today helps businesses connect the hyperconnected, empowering them to transform and reinvent their business online. The company touts itself on removing the complexities of technology, so that customers can focus on driving their business faster forward. At the core of the Akamai’s solutions is the Akamai Intelligent Platform, which provides extensive reach, coupled with unmatched reliability, security, visibility and expertise, according to company officials. 

While Akamai’s customer has certainly changed over the last 14 years, it currently allows about 4,000 customers to enjoy its platform and on any given day, Akamai has 15 to 30 percent of the entire Web being delivered over the Akamai platform. Although early on the typical customer in need of Akamai’s help was premier Web brands and software companies that were highly focused, today Akamai’s roster of clients has expanded to include all 30 of the Top 30 media entertainment and 97 of the tTp 100 Internet resellers.

“What has changed is cloud and the need for delivering applications on the Internet which makes our value proposition horizontal,” Cohen said. “Companies come to us and say, ‘I will use your platform so I have the type of infrastructure and performance that puts me on par with the big guys.’”

In addition to spreading the word about its 14-year history and brag worthy clients at Cloud Expo, Akamai was focused on shedding light about some pretty major announcements including that fact that it has recently signed a global partnership agreement with Amadeus, a travel technology partner and transaction processor for the global travel and tourism industry. The agreement will allow Amadeus to improve the performance of all Web-based services and applications used by Amadeus and its customers, including airline e-Commerce websites and Amadeus’ own suite of booking tools.

As a result of the partnership, Amadeus customers across all segments will be able to leverage the benefits of the Akamai Intelligent Platform, which provides route, protocol and application layer optimizations for the Internet in order to deliver content and applications more quickly, reliably, and securely, according to company officials.

Moreover, the company brought attention to its Terra Cloud Catalyst solution, a solution specifically designed for public cloud providers. With Terra Cloud Catalyst, it becomes easier for hosted storage, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) vendors of all sizes to offer Akamai's industry-leading content delivery network (CDN) services to their customers.

“It takes all of the knowledge that Akamai has and allows us to OEM and embed our CDM technology into the cloud provider’s environment so that cloud users can get a unified experience with one place to buy their utility compute and simply add on CDN services with one way of billing, scaling, and configuring,” Cohen said.

So what can we expect from Akamai for the rest of 2012?

“We made a couple of acquisitions in the first half of the year and one was a company called Blaze and Cotendo and both of them have very adjacent technologies that are going to allow us to advance our position in cloud as well as mobile,” Cohen said. “So the optimizations that we do today on our network are going to be bolstered by the work we are doing by integrating Cotendo and Blaze onto our platform.”

“You will see a lot of that technology come out to market to help customers get more out of cloud as well as mobile devices,” he added.