Akamai Adds with Nine SystemsBy Anastasia Tubanos, theWHIR.com
December 4, 2006 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REIVEW) — As advanced and rich media, such as video, becomes an increasingly essential, even commonplace, part of Web publishing, the opportunities for providers of advanced content delivery solutions become more pronounced.
To enhance its ability to provide better solutions to Web publishers offering rich media, content delivery network operator Akamai Technologies (akamai.com) recently announced it has signed an agreement to acquire rich media solutions provider Nine Systems (ninesystems.com).
Akamai says the acquisition of Nine Systems will provide the company with a framework upon which customers can control and monetize their digital assets. The company plans to integrate Nine Systems’ Stream OS, a suite of configurable rich media management tools that enables easy production and publishing of content online, into the global Akamai network.
The company’s VP of marketing Brad Rinklin says the company’s goal is to provide customers with a unified solution for managing content and controlling delivery across the industry’s most pervasive rich media distribution platform.
“A large amount [of Akamai's business] is from the media and entertainment industry and that industry is a very fascinating, and quite honestly, kind of a sexy aspect of our business and the Internet business as a whole. They’re really taking to market a number of different business models that are very interesting,” says Rinklin. “There are a lot of moving parts with bringing media assets online. There are rule wizards, profile wizards, channel aspects to be able to aggregate, encoding services and commerce for collecting the money for the subscription bases. We’re hoping our acquisition of Nine Systems will allow us to bring a rich media management suite of services to our customers so that they can be able to solve any and all of those problems in kind of a one-stop area.”
Rinklin says that although both companies offer CDN solutions to a similar groups of media and entertainment providers, Nine Systems is complimentary to Akamai’s current offerings and customers should look forward to what this could mean for their businesses.
“We’re the best delivery model in the world. Flat out, largest footprint and proven in the CDN realm. And they really are one of the best rich media management assets out there in the marketplace. You marry those two together and it’s an invaluable combination for those media and entertainment customers,” says Rinklin. “A number of our customers have called us proactively to give us feedback about how excited they are about this merger and are a lot of the reason we decided to buy instead of build. We thought to ourselves, if we’re bringing it to market, let’s just go ahead and get what’s already adopted as some of the best tools in the market place. That gives us a better time to market and enables us to bring to market the ability to control and monetize rich-media assets for end-users.”
Though some details of the agreement have yet to be ironed out, Akamai says that the potential of the deal to bring about changes in the rich-media management industry is considerable.
“Tthere are a lot of different arenas out there that are very interesting for these particular services,” says Rinklin. “And this framework really enables us to be able to create further development aspects within our engineering department to really bring more value to our customers. We are continually trying to move the needle on how much value we bring to the customer. It isn’t just delivery. It’s a large breadth of services that spans the gamut of the value change for our customers.”
Akamai will acquire all of the outstanding common stock, preferred stock and vested and unvested stock options of Nine Systems by issuing approximately 3.1 million shares of Akamai common stock and approximately $7 million in cash, subject to certain closing adjustments. The transaction is expected to close in December 2006.
