Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Keep an eye on Akamai shares today, somewhat volatile after posting second quarter results that across the board in general beat estimates. But you have to read between the lines as to where there was perhaps a bit of a pullback or a miss when it came to compute, for example, but there fully forecast that was raised. Tom Layton, Akami CEO, joins us now to demiss the five for us, Tom, because it's interesting.
You have Paybisana here really talking about lots of moving parts and ultimately they see fairly cloudy still of what the ultimate positioning is of the business. Can you tell it you're really going in on well, cloud infrastructure here, not just content delivery, not just security.
Oh yeah, security majority of our revenue cloud infrastructure services. My goodness. We were up thirty percent year every year, and we think that's going to accelerate. So by the end of this year will be up forty percent plus year over year. Tremendous market opportunity there, strong tailwinds of course from jen Ai. So I think very exciting results
for Akamai. You know, a strong beat on the quarter, very profitable earnings, per share up nine percent and a dollar and seventy three cents, and I think a very good outlook, raising guidance for the year.
So maybe just a little bit of a pause for investors. I mean, the shads are still down over the year or twelve months. Tom, I'm sort of interested therefore, on what they're not getting. What is it about the opportunity in for example, cloud infrastructure. Why take on the hyperscals.
Well, it's a tremendous market opportunity. Our customers have asked us to do that. You know, we with our distributed platform, which is unique in the marketplace. We're in seven hundred and fifty cities. With our points of presence, we can get enterprise computer instances. They're containers closer to the end users, and that gives you lower latency and better performance and for a lot of applications that matters. Also we could
do it at a lower price point. In fact, one of the hyperscalers is an early adopter of our new managed container service. They want to have their compute instances and hundreds of cities around the world, which is something Allly Akamai can do.
Interesting. I mean, maybe people are looking at what drove some of the revenue beat and they're looking at FX, but they're also looking at TikTok inclusion. Have you decided that the risk of being band is just off the table and you're going to really be starting talking about this client once again?
Oh, there's always risk, though it seems that from what we're hearing from public sources that you know, a deal has basically been structured, and you know, there's obviously caught up in trade negotiations, but at this point it seems like the ban has been postponed several times and so we're not seeing anything that suggests that that's going to change in the near future.
You do that content delivery for them. It's interesting that security is where a lot of your growth and as you say, the most part of your revenue has been coming from. What insecurity is driving that growth? Where are people coming to you?
Yeah, we have the market leading solutions for web apt firewall, for bought management, for API security, for stopping ransomware with segmentation, and of course the attack rates have been going way up, the penetrations have been going way up, and we have the solution. It stops the damage caused by those attacks.
So if the ransomware gets in, we identify it quickly, we don't let it spread, and that protects our customers so they don't have these huge costs associated with being shut down by ransomware.
Of course, Jeneral to AI in many ways, making the field of security ever more evolving and nimble is what's crucial. Tom. What I'm also so interested in is the way in which you're thinking about education here in the United States, skills in particular and upskilling. This is something that the US government is calling for a lot, and I'm particularly in the era of Generator Ai. How are you seeing the skill set and the pool of talent? Is it good enough for you?
It's going to change with Jenai. We're seeing tremendous efficiencies across most job types at Akamai, so that our employees can do more in the same amount of time by leveraging Genai. And I think you'll see training. We're doing training ourselves so that employees will change maybe how they do certain things, and they'll be more efficient by learning how to use the Genai tools. I think it's really very exciting and it probably is going to be a sea change over time and education.
Tom Layton a Akamai is always great to have you on after your numbers. Thank you very much for joining the show.