Surviving as backbone for the Net

Paul Sagan, 46, president of Akamai Technologies Inc. of Cambridge since 1999, took over Friday as its chief executive. Akamai, whose vast network of Web servers delivers Internet content for other companies, said on March 16 that it would acquire a competitor, Speedera Networks Inc., for $130 million. Sagan, a former broadcast journalist and three-time Emmy Award winner, spoke with Globe reporter Robert Weisman at Akamai's offices.

Q. Where do you want to take Akamai in the next couple of years?

A. We're very focused on continuing the original mission of Akamai, which is building the world's largest distributed computing platform to help businesses do business better on the Internet.

Q. Is the volume of business traffic on the Net still growing rapidly?

A. We're seeing a rapid increase in the adoption of the Internet, both for the delivery of content, but even more importantly for the delivery of applications such as e-commerce.

So we help e-commerce sites perform better, and it allows our customers to sell more.

Q. What will the acquisition of Speedera allow you to do?

A. It will allow us to acquire a large number of additional customers, who we believe will benefit from Akamai's larger network and even broader service offerings, because we have products that Speedera doesn't offer today. So we believe we'll be able to welcome in their customers and then grow them over time to provide them more services.

We also believe that we'll get some products that we don't offer that Speedera offers that will give us more things to offer to our customers, and also that we'll be able to absorb, I hope, the majority of their employees, who are very skilled in our industry.

Q. Do you plan to acquire other companies?

A. Unclear. We always look for opportunities, but we don't have any fixed timetable on having to do any specific kind of a deal.

Q. Akamai may still be best known to the general public as an Internet shooting star from the dot-com era. Your stock soared 458 percent on its first day of trading in 1999 before falling back to earth. How tough is that legacy for you as a manager?

A. We're not a consumer brand. We sell our services to technology professionals, and there we have a great brand name and great brand recognition. And they really understand that we're about delivering content and accelerating the performance of Web-based applications.

So whatever impression we have with members of the general public really doesn't affect the way we run our business.

Q. When you knock on the door of a company, you're often competing against its own information technology department, which can do content delivery in-house. How difficult is that?

A. Our major competitor is the I'll-do-it-myself answer from the IT professional who is used to buying lots of hardware and software and facilities and cobbling together solutions to their problems. So our first challenge is persuading them that they should outsource to us because we can do a better job at lower cost.

Q. How fast are you expanding overseas? Is that a big growth market?

A. We've always focused some of our attention selling overseas. We deliver content in 69 countries around the world.

Virtually anywhere someone connects to the Internet we can deliver the content and applications close to where they are. We have sales professionals in Asia and Europe, and we'll continue to try to grow that business.

Q. What causes traffic to spike on the Internet? Is it predictable?

A. One of the interesting things is that Internet traffic seems to grow every day. And it does spike around a variety of things. Big news events drive usage. Software downloads, as people go to get, say, virus updates or security patches for their computers, drive lots of traffics. And e-commerce certainly does. So the Christmas selling season drove kind of a continuous spike late last year.

Q. How much bigger do you think Akamai could get?

A. My goal is to work with the employees of Akamai to make this a billion-dollar company. We have a long way to go. We did about $210 million [in sales] last year in our first profitable year.