Akamai splashes out $15 million on Red Swoosh acquisition

Akamai Technologies today confirmed that it has acquired Red Swoosh, which creates client-side technology to support to management and distribution of media files, in an all-stock merger deal worth $15 million.

Additional details of the acquisition, such as timeframes, have not been made public as yet, but the company has confirmed that Red Swoosh staff will be integrated into Akamai's existing California-based engineering team.

"The acquisition of Red Swoosh is expected to augment Akamai's distributed internet presence by combining client-side file management and distribution software with Akamai's scalable backend control system and global network of edge servers," the company said in a statement announcing its latest purchase.

Red Swoosh is not the first company that Akamai has set its sights on this year.

Just last month, Akamai completed the acquisition of Netli, which it bought to enhance its own application acceleration solutions to help grab a chunk of a market that analyst Gartner expects to be worth $3.3 billion in 2010.

"We believe the majority of today's successful enterprises doing business online require both content and application acceleration," Paul Sagan, Akamai's president and chief executive said at the time.

"With our acquisition of Netli now complete, we are excited to add more value to our portfolio of managed services. Netli has developed important technology and operational expertise in the area of application acceleration, and by combining our efforts we expect to offer a compelling and comprehensive set of solutions."

Maggie Holland

Maggie has been a journalist since 1999, starting her career as an editorial assistant on then-weekly magazine Computing, before working her way up to senior reporter level. In 2006, just weeks before ITPro was launched, Maggie joined Dennis Publishing as a reporter. Having worked her way up to editor of ITPro, she was appointed group editor of CloudPro and ITPro in April 2012. She became the editorial director and took responsibility for ChannelPro, in 2016.

Her areas of particular interest, aside from cloud, include management and C-level issues, the business value of technology, green and environmental issues and careers to name but a few.