Akamai agrees to acquire SOASTA

Akamai Technologies, has announced that the company has entered into an agreement to acquire SOASTA, a leader in Digital Performance Management. The acquisition is intended to give Akamai customers greater visibility into the business impact of their website and application optimization strategies. The all-cash transaction is expected to close early in the second quarter.

Online businesses are well aware of the benefits of delivering exceptional digital experiences to their customers. Studies have shown that sites and applications need to be fast and reliable to maximize both consumer interaction and business outcomes. For example, nearly 10% of visitors will leave a site if response times increase by only one second and nearly 30% of visitors will not return to a slow site.

Traditionally, online businesses have found it challenging to generate a holistic view of website and application performance. Application logic and complexity are moving to the front-end (e.g. browsers, and native mobile applications), limiting the effectiveness of traditional Application Performance Management solutions that are more focused on monitoring IT infrastructure performance as opposed to the real-world experience of actual end users. Increasing investment in, and dependence on, third-party services introduces even greater complexity. SOASTA addresses these challenges with a unified platform for measurement, testing and analysis that delivers performance insights across both technology and business contexts.

“Akamai has long been associated with delivering exceptional technology solutions for optimizing web and mobile application performance,” explained Ash Kulkarni, senior vice president and general manager, Web Performance and Security, Akamai. “The addition of SOASTA’s technology is intended to give our customers new ways to measure, optimize and validate the business impact of their web performance strategies.”

Through its acquisition of SOASTA, Akamai plans to add several new capabilities to its Web Performance Solutions portfolio. Akamai customers will have improved ability to accurately measure how real users experience their applications, and how that experience impacts their behavior. This will help customers prioritize and implement the most impactful performance optimization strategies to positively affect business outcomes. Through SOASTA solutions, Akamai customers will then be able to test optimizations at scale prior to deployment and validate the business impact of those optimizations once they are live in production. The result is a comprehensive set of cloud-based performance and business outcome optimization solutions.

“As important as web and mobile site and application optimization is to online businesses, the ability to truly understand the result of those optimization strategies is crucial to continued success,” stated Tom Lounibos, CEO, Co-founder of SOASTA. “This acquisition will provide Akamai customers, many of whom are already SOASTA customers, with a new way to measure and test the optimizations they are making to their sites, and validate the actual business impact of their site’s performance.”

SOASTA, headquartered in Mountain View, California, is a privately funded company. The closing of the transaction is expected to occur early in the second quarter of 2017. The Company expects the SOASTA acquisition to be slightly dilutive to Akamai’s Non-GAAP net income per share for FY 2017 in the range of $0.06 to $0.07 and to become accretive in 2018.