Akamai Hires New CFO, Looks Toward IPO

As it drives toward its upcoming initial public offering, Akamai Technologies has strengthened its hand by hiring banking veteran Timothy Weller to be its chief financial officer. The company offers content-delivery services that speed up performance for e-commerce sites, portal sites and news sites.

Weller had been an equity research analyst at investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, where he focused on the telecommunications and Internet industries. DLJ is a co-manager of Akamai’s upcoming IPO. Weller has personally been involved in more than $10 billion (US$) of lead-managed equity and debt financing for companies including Mindspring, PSINet, Qwest and Verio.

“Tim has been instrumental in many of the largest financial transactions affecting today’s communications industry,” said George Conrades, chairman and CEO of Akamai.

Last Wednesday, Akamai fortified its board of advisors by announcing the appointment of Jan-Hier-King, who is currently the enterprise technology head of electronic brokerage at Charles Schwab. Also on the advisory board are executives at networking giant Cisco Systems, CNN and the Washington Post.

Akamai Files for IPO

Monday’s announcement follows Friday news that Akamai filed for an IPO that could raise $86.25 million. Last Wednesday, Akamai announced a deal with networking giant Cisco Systems to jointly develop new content routing, switching and caching technologies. In addition, Cisco has made a $49 million investment for a four percent stake in Akamai.

“With approximately 80 percent of Internet traffic traversing Cisco routers and switches, the next phase of Internetworking is to deliver content-based routing, switching and storage,” said Maria Mazzola, senior vice president at Cisco.

Akamai also announced details of its streaming-media deal with Apple Computer, which has a five percent equity stake in Akamai. Apple’s QuickTime player and streaming server technology will be integrated into Akamai’s content delivery service.

About Akamai

Akamai’s customers include Apple, CNN, The Go Network, idealab!, jcrew.com, Looksmart and Sportsline USA. Akamai’s products speed up the load time and improve the overall performance and dependability of Web pages. The company’s Internet content delivery network has grown to more than 900 servers in 15 countries. It serves more than 250,000 million hits each day.