( BW)(MA-AKAMAI/FRESTON)(AKAM) Akamai Announces Executive Appointments; MTV Networks' Chairman & CEO Joins Board of Advisors
Business Editors
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 5, 2000--
Akamai Advisory Board welcomes entertainment industry luminary; Akamai executive team appoints vice president of product strategy &
management, and vice president of engineering
Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM), which offers global, high performance services for the delivery of Internet content and applications, today announced additions to its Board of Advisors and management team. The newest member of Akamai's Board of Advisors is MTV Networks' Chairman and CEO Tom Freston. In addition, Akamai announced two executive appointments, including George Kurian as Vice President of Product Strategy & Management, and Ross Seider as Vice President of Engineering.
"Akamai continues to attract world-class business and technology professionals, and we are extremely proud of the strength of the management team that we have in place," said George Conrades, chairman and CEO of Akamai. "Our Board of Advisors consists of thought-leaders across a wide range of industries which fosters important insight into the development of technology that will best serve our customers. We are excited to welcome Tom Freston to this group, and to add George Kurian and Ross Seider to our executive team."
MTV's Freston Joins Industry Visionaries on Akamai Advisory Board
Akamai's advisory board provides counsel and direction on developing technology standards, business strategy, and products and services that enhance the delivery of Web content and applications, creating new levels of Internet performance and reliability.
Tom Freston, MTV Networks' Chairman and CEO, is an important addition to Akamai's Board of Advisors, having been instrumental in the development of MTV which revolutionized the music and entertainment industry. Mr. Freston oversees the management of MTV Networks, which owns and operates five basic cable television programming networks - MTV, M2, VH1, Nickelodeon/Nick at Nite, Nick at Nite's TV Land, and The Suite from MTV & VH1. Mr. Freston joins Akamai's current Board of Advisors, which includes:
- Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium;
- Gil Friesen, director of The Digital Entertainment Network,
and a media pioneer;
- Sam Gassel, chief systems engineer, CNN Internet
Technologies;
- Ron Graham, chief scientist emeritus, AT&T Labs, and
treasurer of the National Academy of Sciences;
- Jan Hier-King, enterprise technology head of electronic
brokerage, Charles Schwab & Company, Inc.
- Amos Hostetter, founder of Continental Cablevision;
- Daniel Smith, CEO of Sycamore Networks;
- Peter Solvik, senior vice president and CIO of Cisco
Systems;
- Ralph Terkowitz, CIO of The Washington Post Company.
Akamai Adds Two Vice Presidents
Joining Akamai's executive team in the Cambridge, MA office is George Kurian as vice president of product strategy & management, and Ross Seider as vice president of engineering.
In his new role, George Kurian will be responsible for overseeing all of product management and strategy for Akamai's revolutionary service offerings that improve the ease, reliability, performance, and functionality of delivering Internet content and applications.
Prior to joining Akamai, Mr. Kurian was a senior engagement manager in the San Francisco office of McKinsey & Company, overseeing projects in the firm's Electronic Commerce, Information Technology and Software practices. During his tenure at McKinsey, he also worked in its London, Stockholm and Milan offices. From 1990 to 1994, Mr. Kurian was a product manager at Oracle Corporation, developing and marketing the company's enterprise applications software. Mr. Kurian holds an MBA degree from Stanford University, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University.
As Akamai's Vice President of Engineering, Ross Seider will be responsible for directing a team of more than 125 world-renowned research scientists and Internet technology visionaries to continue to evolve Akamai's content and application delivery platform. Formerly, Mr. Seider was vice president of product development in Motorola's Information Systems Group, a $750 million supplier of wireline and cable packet communications equipment and services. During his 12-year tenure at Motorola, Mr. Seider held various management positions, most recently being accountable for all engineering development and support for the Multiservices Network Division's WAN-access, multi-protocol, router family.
Prior to Motorola, Mr. Seider was with Concord Communications Inc., a publicly traded provider of LAN products and services where he served as Vice President of LAN Engineering and was a Co-Founder of Concord Data Systems. Mr. Seider also worked at Codex Corporation and Raytheon Corporation. Mr. Seider earned his MBA from Northeastern University, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute.
About Akamai
Akamai Technologies is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has offices in San Mateo, California. Akamai provides global Internet content and applications delivery services for more than 100 customers, improving Web site speed and reliability and enabling richer, more engaging Web site content. Currently, Akamai has deployed 1700 servers in 30 countries across 100 different telecommunications networks. Akamai (pronounced AH kuh my) is Hawaiian for intelligent, clever and cool.
The release contains information about future expectations, plans and prospects of Akamai's management that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors including, but not limited to, the dependence on Akamai's Internet content delivery service, a failure of its network infrastructure, the complexity of its service and the networks on which the service is deployed, the failure to obtain access to transmission capacity and other factors that are discussed in the Company's Registration Statement on Form S-1 and other documents periodically filed with the SEC.
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CONTACT: Akamai Technologies Contacts:
Jeff Young
Marketing Manager
617-250-3913
jyoung@akamai.com
-or-
Caryn Converse
Marketing Manager
617-250-4661
converse@akamai.com |
