I think this is Akamai figuring out they need to address the self-serve market.
Akamai has 6x the edge network footprint of Cloudflare and has all the cool trendy stuff like edge workers, they just suck at selling to the developer.
Akamai has 6x the edge network footprint of Cloudflare and has all the cool trendy stuff like edge workers, they just suck at selling to the developer.
Akamai sucks at selling to everyone.
Here's a typical Akamai experience:
* An Account Manager (AM) - in a suit - he is going to be the one talking. Not an expert in anything, except maybe Brooks Brothers suits from a few seasons ago.
* Account Manager's Lackey (AML) - he is going to be the one with an iPad. His job is to type in the notes of the meeting, typically using a two finger peck method. This of course takes a very long time. So everyone speaks slowly. Sometimes AM would ask AML something about things that are coming or being rolled out using Akamai internal jargon.
* Account Manager's Attachment (AMA) - does not really talk, looks uncomfortable. Based on the way AMA is dressed it might be a sales engineer
* Every single response to your question would be something that you can either find on the website ( AM, AML and AMA are convinced you cannot read ) which does not actually answer the question or is met with "I will need to loop in the appropriate parties and get you an answer"
* Nearly every request that one would presume can be completed programatically is met with "We need to engage professional services for that." which is billed at some insane amount
That's experience of paying Akamai millions of dollars a year. Needless to say, spending three years untangling Akamai integration was worth it.
It's a classic case of not seeing the up and coming market because you were winning the existing market.
It would be a much bigger hurdle for Linode to become enterprise-friendly than for Akamai to become developer-friendly.
Akamai is "call for pricing" because they never evolved from an enterprise product. And no "enterprise" just buys off the shelf. They negotiate with a long budget, vendor risk management, legal, etc. process. Its unlikely that many of their contracts are even the same verbiage.
As far as I know companies usually evolve into an enterprise product, moving up the ladder, rather than going down.
Yes, the sales cycles are longer, but there’s more money and less headache with customer support and customer success.
E.g. 1 customer paying $10,000 per month vs 100 paying $99 p/m.
But we can all think of 100s of companies that did not do this and either died or are hollow shells of their former selves.
Cloudflare et al are commoditizing their gig. As more new blood goes into enterprises, they’ll want to use what they’re already familiar with vs the big enterprise thing they’ve never touched and find awkward.
I don’t know that a) I’m right or b) that they’ll be successful.
But Enterprising Linode would be folly. Even late entrants like Oracle Cloud are struggling due to lack of support from Enterprise cloud products. Changing them to support all the annoying acronym requirements of an Enterprise is a many year journey. AWS and Azure really only did that to support their huge government contracts.
I think the only other viable theory is for them to try and keep Linode as Linode as just a diversification play.
That would be odd, to me at least, because they’re buying an offering that seems to be slowly dying anyway. It really never left the hobbyist/tiny shop market, and even there, AWS/Azure is eating into them. I do have a soft spot for them as they’re a much more “human” company.
They have all the major compagnies / F500, though so no need to appeal to the HN crowd.
I wish I could fail so hard.
It’s not really apples to apples in terms of scale in the context of footprint
You can do most thing with configuration. EdgeWorkers are also available if you want to run your own JS at the Edge https://developer.akamai.com/akamai-edgeworkers-overview