Akamai Technologies, Inc. (AKAM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Great. Thank you very much. So got our next conference kicking off here, starting off with Tom Barth, who's over at Akamai. And we're going to do a fireside chat here for the next 30 to 40 minutes. As you're probably aware, you can ask questions. I'll relay those questions. Feel free to ask them any time during the fireside chat.

So Tom, I think everybody knows who Akamai is. Why don't we jump into the real content. Can you talk a little bit about what has happened to traffic over the course of the last 3 -- 2, 3, 4 months as COVID kicked in? And what's happening here in May in traffic?

Yes. Certainly, Alex. Good morning. Thank you for having us. I'm also joined with Rick Eskelsen from the IR team. But I want to say hello to everyone else. And certainly, for all of us, it's been a very interesting time to say the least. Traffic for us -- sorry, I got some pets coming in. I can always tell them the kids aren't sleeping. You know what I mean, pets all converging here. But anyway, so I think starting in March, we definitely saw a definitive increase in traffic. And obviously, over the last few years, you've seen increased video, you've seen increased gaming. Software downloads continue to increase. But in March, there was a distinctive increase in traffic. And we talked a little bit about, across our platform, we basically saw a year's worth of increase in traffic in the month of March. And obviously, things haven't really changed as you moved into the second quarter in terms of the market dynamics. And the big gains that you saw were people were sitting around at home, and they're watching more movies. They're also -- I was joking about how my kids were getting kicked out of the house 3 months ago, and now they're all bolted in. So gaming 24/7 versus you'd see some at night and a lot on the weekends. And so Akamai and the CDN space, in general, has benefited from a lot of incremental traffic, and Akamai has benefited a bit more. We had some capacity that we have been investing in advance in anticipation of a lot of OTT launches. And obviously, one of those in the fourth quarter, Disney continues to be extremely successful. So I think we're excited about where we are positioned in making the Internet more fast, more reliable. We'll talk a little bit about secure as well because there's some increased risks that come with all this additive usage.

So the traffic spiked up in the latter half of March and certainly was up, what, 30% to 50% in April. Now 2 observations: Isn't that all edge traffic? Because I've heard from other companies that are more in the metro core and long-haul side of the world that they really haven't seen that kind of traffic increase.

Yes. Well, I mean, for us, everything we talk about is edge, right? Because we're situated in 3,900 locations around the world. And probably, the next person is -- the next company is just north of 200. So we -- everything we do is at the edge, which allows us to better manage a lot of this capacity based on heavy usage. The -- we obviously delivered most of the internet traffic other than Netflix or Google with YouTube. But if you're trying to push a lot of traffic through the middle mile, as you talked about some of these folks, there's a lot of choke points that come with these ports, and the ability to push a lot of this traffic through is one of the inabilities of more centralized strategies of using the Internet. And again, when you're talking in smaller volumes or smaller distances, it can be a little bit more manageable. But when you're talking about peak periods -- or now you have a ton of peak periods. It wasn't like before where it was after everyone came home from work and the kids came home from school. Now you have everybody home all the time. And so managing this capacity is really a challenge and why I'm very positive about our software brain but also about our distributed platform, which we partner with carriers around the world.

So has the traffic flattened out in May after the initial work-from-home surge?

Well, it's more consistent to what you saw at the back half of March. And so when you hear about CDNs that are also public or about Akamai talk about the media business, we're very obviously optimistic about that business in the second quarter. We'll talk a little bit about the guide. But what you don't know is what happens as everything gets back to normal. Plus you're in the third quarter, which tends to, on the CDN side, seasonally have a little bit more challenges as people go camping or whatever the case might be. So I think, again, the media business, again, is -- it's benefiting from all the tailwinds that all of us see. And whether that's keeping our devices up-to-date on software or it's talking to people or working remotely, we are fortunately to be in a very good space as some of the other companies that others talk about.

So how is it different outside of the U.S.? Have you seen any changes regionally that -- is there more traffic internationally, less traffic internationally? How does it split?

Yes. It's a global phenomenon, right? I think, again, in general, what you have is, in places like India, you actually have a lot less expensive bandwidth being given away with cheaper phones, and you see a lot of traffic increase in countries like India, right? And so -- where all of a sudden, cricket on your phone became a national phenomena. So yes, international traffic, particularly, it's interesting when you think about Akamai, a lot of times, we have this network operations center, and they track all the Internet usage around the world. And for the most part, they know where there are problems in the world far in advance of something like CNN because Internet traffic will spike, right? And so what we saw in a lot of these countries where there was a lot of challenges, you could see Internet usage starting to go up dramatically. And you can almost trace a little bit about where COVID was starting to really accelerate just based on Internet usage.

So how does traffic volume translate into business for Akamai? And should we be thinking about the spike in demand as a one-to-one correlation to your business? Or is, in fact, your business more driven off of contracts and other things that have been...

Obviously, for a long-time investor, I mean, in the old days, CDN and traffic growth was 100% of our business. Today, it's slightly less than 1/3 on the CDN side. So -- but that is a traffic-based business. So when you have customers, they buy a bucket of bits and they use those bits and Akamai delivers them for them. So that business, obviously, has been benefiting dramatically, but it's the most variable part of the business. You have to ensure that you have capacity. And so there's a lot of great things that come with that business. There's a lot of things that professionalism and experience and a distributed platform really benefit. But we also have more than -- a majority of the business, to your point, today, and why I think Akamai is a really good investment, you're getting the benefits of all this traffic, but you also have these other parts of your business where visibility of the revenue streams are very, very strong. It's more of a monthly recurring bill. And so if you invest in Akamai, you get a little bit of best of both worlds.

So one of the areas that has been hurt by what's been going on is live sports and other type of live events. Is there a difference in profitability between the standard streaming products and the live products?

Yes. It's interesting. I mean, there's definitely some price differentials between some of the bits, right? But there's also difficulties in delivering some of those bits. So I think from a finance lens, it's sort of a net wash on the delivery of the bits in terms of cost versus the price and the difficulty of the delivery. So obviously, things like international bits, you would get a little bit more money for, but then there's also some associated costs with it. Livestream tends to be a little bit better than just regular video. But in general, for us, I think just the fact that there's increased traffic is great for the business. And when you look at the operating leverage of our platform, right, you can see in the quarters where we have very strong media bit quarters, and you can see that in some of our competitors is that you tend to not only have a very good revenue quarter, but you tend to have a really good profit or cash flow quarter, right? Because in effect, you're filling up your hotel to 100% occupancy. And all of your costs are fixed, and that's how you make -- that's how you start making some real amount of money. And what I'm pleased to tell you is that our CDN business is already profitable, and then you start running these excess bits in it, and it really starts helping the cash more. And maybe some of our competitors who aren't quite there at the profitability, they had to really benefit in this first quarter from running this network hot and then probably some benefits from -- like we did as well about less costs, right? You have less travel, less marketing events. You have all these other -- less hiring. And all of a sudden, you have this benefit of running your network hot and less cost, and you have a great financial quarter. And we're the same. So I'm not -- it's a good space to be in.

So back in 2012, if I remember the numbers correctly, and I'll probably screw them up. But I think it was 26% of your revenues were coming from the web titans, the...

Yes. 2014, that was a heck of a year. I remember it well because it was like you couldn't do any wrong. You had the giants business, and you have the long tail of your customer base all driving increased traffic. And...

And those guys concentrated and built out their own CDN edge to basically in-source. That's down, if I remember correctly, 5.8% in the most recent quarter. It seems like that's stabilizing mostly in the -- with that traffic that you're handling for them in the international markets, where they just don't have the footprints. So that seems to be stabilizing. But that pendulum had shifted way over to a high concentration of traffic, on-demand traffic coming from a very few number of people. It seems like that's fracturing now with all of these new services coming on, Time Warner coming on, Disney coming on, Peacock coming on. How do you see those companies behaving? Are they going to keep their traffic on your type of CDN? Or would they build it out themselves? And how do you see that splintering of that concentration benefiting the company?

Yes. So to your point, which is a very good point, is that you had sort of the behemoth -- the tech behemoths, right? You have a real technology bend to their company, and these are the Apples and Facebooks and Googles of the world. And for the most part, every one of those 6 have their own capabilities, right? And they for the most part, to your example, they have stabilized. There are some use cases where they use Akamai more. There's some repricing that happens from time to time. But in the most part, it's in between that $40 million to $45 million-ish kind of window. But there's use cases internationally. There's new use cases where why would they invest in something where they're not sure how that will play out yet. But when you start talking about some of this other universe, like content generators, they don't have that same moxie that these tech behemoths have, right, where they have R&D budgets or cash. These are people that just create content, and so for them to go build out something on their own is a herculean -- it's a -- frankly, it's a bridge too far for many, particularly when you look at the international markets, right, where the backbone isn't as sophisticated to go do it. And that's why we have a very healthy CDN competitive environment in the U.S. It's because it's easier to deliver in the U.S. because the Internet infrastructure is better. Now for companies like Disney and others, I mean, I'm sure there's an internal champion who thinks they can do it better or cheaper. But you have to think about all the investments that have to go on the spreadsheet, and that's very -- it's very, very complicated. And I would say the financial profile of building this out is much more difficult today based on bit pricing than it was back in 2014, right? So today, the market is extremely efficient in CDN. Customers tend to use a couple of CDNs. And so as long as this wave continues to bring up sort of a rising tide, all CDNs are benefiting. But as things get more complex, more global, more usage, I believe that our distributed platform will obviously be much more effective than some of the others. But again, customers, they've become very savvy in terms of tech buying on the CDN side and why that is such a very difficult business to sort of break out of the Earth's atmosphere into growth of revenues as well as profitability.

So just to remind people, if I remember the statistics correctly, about 50% of Internet traffic is video-on-demand content. And that only accounts for 20% of the minutes watched. Still, linear television is 80% of the volume. With this fracturing, do you think that, that on-demand percentage is going to go up significantly? If it does, I would think it would really drive enormous traffic growth. And since you're fracturing the concentration, I would think that would keep the pricing from getting out -- getting hurt as much. Do you think you can see an acceleration of volume and a moderation of pricing?

Yes. No, I mean, we're very excited about that business for much of the dynamics that you've mentioned right there. For Akamai, over half of our platform traffic is video. Look, I mean, the content people believe it, right? I mean, Disney, it's the only game in town if you're walking around the Orlando headquarters at Disney, right? I mean that's -- they don't have theme parks yet. They don't have cruise ships. What they have is streaming video. But you also have some additional launches. You have some happening this quarter. You have like things like HBO. You have things on the horizon, which is like the NBC Peacock, or you even have some international launches where Akamai obviously has a very, very good position in. So -- and I think we're very excited about our role. And as usage goes up, level of complexity and difficulty goes up. And again, I'm very excited when we actually do open up our headquarters, we have a very unique, "one of its kind" broadcast operations center where Akamai can bring in all these folks and show them that not only are we the most efficient at delivery of these bits, but also we can find problems if there are such things, long before their customer hotlines pick up. So what's been interesting is that in the -- you have the old broadcast world, and a lot of those executives moved to this OTT world. And for them, more distribution was better. And what they're learning through time is that less CDNs is better because, a, you get better pricing; but also the quality control is much more critical, right, because consumers will only tolerate so much failure. So what happens is they tend to start with a larger pool of CDNs and then sort of scale down as they become more sophisticated in their understanding of the benefits of the Internet and OTT.

So there was a lot of expectations built into the stock going into your 2Q print. Clearly, the stock had run up quite aggressively. And some people were out saying, "Oh, this is the best thing that could ever happen with all this volume." You produced a very good 2Q. You then turned around and -- oh, excuse me, 1Q, then turned around and offered a solid, better-than-forecast 2Q, but you pulled your full year number guide and said we're not going to forecast the full year. I think some people took that as kind of a negative, that there might be not as much visibility, but it sounds to me like that actually could go either way, that you could make a case for it being to the upside or to the downside. So can you talk about that decision and what the range of possible solutions will look like as we go into the back half of the year?

Yes. So I -- first of all, I thank you for recognizing that we actually had a very, very strong quarter in the first quarter. And we gave a very, very strong guide. I think people that didn't know Akamai as well thought that 30% metric up in March meant -- would correlate to 30% revenue growth when that -- for those that have begun to understand our business better is that the video traffic doesn't correlate directly to that revenue growth as much, right? There's a lot of flow-through and everything. So -- but in general, it was a fantastic quarter. We have a really good guide that's out there. And again, I think we're very pleased about our position across all our business, but the annual guide was a very difficult decision for the company. There were a lot of champions for having the guide and a lot of people that were sitting around saying, well, look, we have a lot of PhDs sitting around here, but we don't have a lot of epidemiologists. We don't have a lot of behavioral psychologists. We don't know what's going to happen. So to your point, probably the guide... [Audio Gap]

Can you guys hear me?

Raising the high end, right, based on the retail segment, which, frankly, we have a responsibility as a public company to do -- provide the way the business is going to operate. And the financial guidance on that would have been wider than it probably would have been helpful. And again, we have a very diverse business. A lot of that business has good visibility into. But frankly, who knows what's -- I mean, we said you got to worry about some companies going -- filing for bankruptcy. And in general, the online businesses for those companies are doing fantastic. But so we had to look at what that might mean for Akamai as they reset their own businesses into more of an online business. So I think -- again, I think we're very excited about where we're situated. I think what we do is, when you're a larger entity in this space, you try and do the right thing. And we did the right thing, I think, on guidance, even though it was difficult for us. But once we get better visibility in the future, we'll reinstate annual guidance. That's part of our plan. Now another big thing about being a larger entity with a very healthy balance sheet, which our competitors probably don't have such a -- maybe some have been helped more recently. But in general, you look to help some of these industries as they get through a very trying time, right? I don't -- like some of the major airlines, they're not going to go out of business. They can't afford to because of what the future would mean for these things, and the governments will likely help them out. But how can we help them out and maybe help ourselves out longer term around contracts, right? Can we help them on some longer pay terms while we elongate some of these contracts? So I think I feel like we've acted really responsibly. And I think as soon as we can reinstate guidance, we probably will. But again, I think we're very pleased about where we sit in the ecosystems of CDN and web acceleration as well as security.

Yes. Well, let's turn to security. That's really an interesting topic. So briefly, can you talk about what you've seen in terms of change in attack patterns? I think there's been a big spike, has there not?

Yes. No, there's no question. Again, we also have a security operations center that I'd love to give investors tours of if things get back to normal. But look, I mean when -- I've been at Akamai for 7 years, right? And the average customer was attacked like 12,000 times a day back then. A year ago, it was 18,000. Now it's north of 20,000 times a day. And obviously, attackers look for risk profiles. And everything just went through a major increase in risk profile in the last 3 months, right? You have all these users from home. And frankly, in financial services or technology companies, working from home just added an extra level of bulk. I mean we're all relatively prepared to work from home, but there are a lot of industries where nobody had laptops, and nobody was able to work from home. So what you saw there are CIOs in sort of a dial-911 situation for security. And Akamai actually benefited from that, not only on the application firewall level but also helping protect them from DoS, VOD management. And where we saw a really exciting sort of increase of awareness and interest is on the enterprise, so protecting the remote user while they're doing their work from home and also provide...

For those that may not know your security business, can you just give us a snapshot very briefly about what the size and growth rate it is and percent of your business?

Yes, sure. So the ones that we've -- the longest part of our business so far is the web application firewall business. This is -- think of Akamai servers as a virtual front-end entrance into your ecosystem as a customer. We can scan things for malware, phishing, and we're very, very effective out there and not serving as sort of a filter on your actual firewall, which slows down a lot of the performance. And so people, as they buy Akamai Security, they actually see an increase in performance of their traffic. So that business is north of $300 million run rate for us. It's our largest business. Still continues to grow. We continue to find additional use cases for this type of technology. Our other business that people are most familiar with is our denial of service. This is sort of a mob that attacks your site and overwhelms it with volumes. Again, we do this. We can filter that out there at the farthest edges of the web and, again, let your firewall security technology do what it's supposed to do, right, which is...

There's a perception out there that DDoS is an older technology. I was surprised, when I looked at the statistics, that's actually an area that is showing extraordinary growth. I mean the complexity and the changes and the mechanics of how they're attacking have changed enough that, that area is, in fact, still a very high-growth arena.

Yes, it's certainly growing for us very nicely. It's north of $100 million business. I think the question is, how much can people afford? I mean the attack vectors of these things are much more frequent. And they're much larger, right? And so you need a lot of capacity to withstand these attacks. But look, people don't talk about DoS attacks that much because let's talk -- you're basically dealing with people that are bribing you to pay them for -- to not do things. That's where a lot of these attack vectors come and where we see a lot of business come in and say, wow, I didn't realize -- like most 28-year old men, they don't realize they need life insurance until they see someone that passed away around them, unfortunately, right? So the DoS attack is really the closest thing you can have to make sure that -- you got to pay for it, but what is the value of it until you really see these types of attacks, right?

So botnet is your newest really meaningful addition to the company's security portfolio. For people who may not know what a botnet is and how it is utilized, can you talk a little bit about what that is, why it's important? And can you talk about the growth rate opportunity?

Yes. So much -- it was our fastest product to $100 million plus. And so for folks that don't know bots, I think most people are probably aware of it. But probably anywhere from 40% to 70% of a company's website are bots, right? There's good bots. These are search engine optimizations where you're trying to find something. But there's a lot of really bad bots, and Akamai has built this very elegant solution that can detect against good versus evil bots as well as what's the great response to do this. Do you reject them? Do you accept them? Do you absorb them? Do you change the dynamic around things? And so that business has very little competition. It is a very sophisticated product. And I think if you're the business owner of a website, I just don't see why you wouldn't buy this product. It's very critical to know who your live customers are versus what are these other kind of bots.

So just as an example, a bot that could attack an airline by going out and buying its seats up and then canceling them, that type of thing...

No. I mean when you think -- I don't understand how that's not illegal, but yes, if you're a competing airline, you would buy up a competitor's -- all their seats. You don't have to pay for them for 24 hours. Now traffic is driven to your airline. They can -- you can charge whatever you want because the people need to travel. And it isn't a great analogy right now, but when things open up, that's very valuable. And then you just terminate all your reservations, right? You haven't paid a dime, and you've driven traffic to your own site. So I mean that's an example of a bot. It could also be inventory scraping and then you can resell all those tickets out at a later price at a higher price. So look, it's a very valuable business. And again, to conceptually think about this is that if you're already routing your traffic through the Akamai server before it comes to you for web application firewall, turning on the Bot Manager solution is a very simple thing to buy, right, because you're already routing your traffic through Akamai. We've talked a little bit about the new product that comes out later this year, Page Integrity, which would also allow you to not only scrub your own traffic but any third-party content that's also located on your website, which is where a lot of these infractions around malware are and phishing and everything else are actually sneaking in the side door, if you will. And I think we're very excited about that because, again, if -- your other choice is to add another place to go route your traffic through, right, whether that's a server on your firewall or find some small niche competitor that maybe hasn't been proven yet. So I think we're very excited about that business. So -- and -- but that will come out later this year. We're also excited about the enterprise business, where there is a very active product called Enterprise Application Access. This allows you and your remote user to have better access as well as security to your cloud-based applications from a company. And so we -- this is a very nascent market. This is the area that Zscaler is trying to play in. This is a very small but very fast-growing product for them, this enterprise application access. I believe, because of our -- the way we have situated our cloud and some of this network layer application stuff, we are much more sophisticated than they are. Now also, something that we have is Enterprise Threat Protector, and this becomes much more sophisticated later this year with the launch of our Secure Web Gateway product. But today, Zscaler, it's the majority of their revenue. And again, they have a very good solution here, and they have a sales force that goes with it is to sell this sort of secure web gateway as they -- it's sort of a VPN replacement, which is much more effective, we think, but also much less expensive.

So given all of that, let me, first off, remind anybody who's listening to this dialogue that you can ask questions, and we'll certainly relay them. [Operator Instructions] What's going on with the competition? You've seen a lot of competition from Fastly, Cloudflare, Limelight, StackPath. What's going on with that? How is it impacting your business? Are you seeing any change in your business as a result of these players? And clearly, they've had some surprising moves in their stocks. Fastly and Cloudflare really reacted much more dramatically than Akamai. How do you see the competition shaking out here?

Yes. It's interesting. I would say they're CDN, web acceleration and security competitors. In security, the big change there is that CIOs are really understanding that cloud-based security solutions can help them, right? So Okta, Zscaler and Akamai, we're all benefiting from that. But the language of the, like, Palo Altos of the world are all trying to figure out how they get to the cloud, right? And that's a very difficult product migration for them, and some will do better at it than others. Web acceleration hasn't changed much over the last 2 years. You see our competitors, who are not as good but a lot cheaper, and sometimes in tougher environments, you have to make sure that you're really close to your customer to make sure that they don't sort of take the easy way out. Because the business owner doesn't want to take the easy way out, but the head of procurement does, right? They want to buy whatever is cheaper. And so we do a lot of bundling of benefits of other products, like security with our web acceleration product. And then I would say Cloudflare is a web acceleration company that also does some security. It's -- they serve different customer sets than Akamai, so we probably don't see them as much than people probably like to believe. But all the CDNs have web acceleration, and so that's something we pay attention to. But none of the other CDNs have security, right? And that's a benefit that Akamai has. So on the CDN side, the competition hasn't really changed. It's very difficult in the U.S. to sort of scale in that business. We've had several competitors, like we have, show a very good CDN quarter. They will -- it's a very difficult business to scale and also make money on. So time will tell on those. But again, I would say, in the near term, they benefit much like we do, and then they're at a much different premium because people are investing because they see revenue growth. They don't necessarily see the -- some of the tougher challenges on around profit in that business. But again, if you run your network hot and you save some on expenses, you're going to go show a nice profit quarter. But in the end, as the Internet, particularly the middle mile becomes more congested, these companies that are more centralized in the middle mile will have greater difficulties.

Let's shift gears a little bit. One of the things that I have asked all the time is what companies should be investing for 5G. And it doesn't -- Akamai doesn't come to mind for most investors as a 5G play. But the trajectory around pushing applications to the edge, the CI/CD pipelining of applications, adoption of Kubernetes and 5G are coming together at the access edge. And certainly, you guys are well positioned to host in a lot of that. In addition to that, serverless architectures play into that. So how does 5G and serverless and application delivery impact your business?

Yes. I'd say there's 2 levels: One is it just increases the Internet usage. And that's -- you can't quantify that for Akamai, but we benefit, as you've seen in the last few months, when more people are reading or looking or buying things online, and 5G makes that even more accessible for much of the world to do that more effectively. I think where you might see a more direct impact -- but it's still way too early to tell that -- I want people to know that we have a very organized R&D effort about what other trends can we add on to our Akamai platform to make it very -- continually expand. And one of those areas would be Internet of things, right? And so 5G makes something like the Internet of Things more effective. You could probably throw blockchain in and something like that. But again, Akamai's distributed platform, with all these servers around the world in various countries combined with 5G will help probably make that more of a reality. Now the question is, what's the financial profiles of these new businesses? And can companies go make money on it versus just selling sort of the sexy idea of it, right? And I think, again, how much will an auto company pay for 24/7 information around their vehicle? What happens with the tires or the carburetor or the engine? And so I mean, if you're an engineer, you're thinking about, do I sell different cars based on a car that commutes at 60 miles an hour all day or one that sells stop-and-go traffic all day, right? These are -- what's the wear and tear on a vehicle as people drive these things? I think these are exciting sort of concepts, and Akamai's working closely with various verticals, whether it's manufacturing or automotive, and how we can help -- the Akamai platform can help them sort of detail more information about yourself.

So in that -- in 5G environment with serverless architectures coming down the pike, do you think that, that is going to cause a big increase in your business over time? Is that something that's a meaningful-enough type of needle?

It's hard for me to quantify it because we're talking about what's out there. But I think, again, the more users that are using the Internet, the better it is for Akamai. I mean I hate to give that sort of a "bigger than a bread basket" answer, but that's my view. That's what we saw with the introduction of broadband. That's what we saw with 3G, 4G, and I don't think 5G changes that much. But as a matter of fact, you could argue that our platform becomes even more efficient in an era of 5G.

So looking at the argument that application growth is supposed to be in the 30% to 40% annually for the next 5 years based on IDC forecasts. And that application -- the case of microservices, architectures are constantly being updated as each independent microservice is updated. It's pushed out literally 2, 3, 4, 5 times a day. That -- in that environment, your edge is going to be updated consistently, constantly. Some companies like Fastly would argue that your architecture is not able to handle that. Would you like to refute that argument?

Well, I mean, I -- look, I would say that scale is very important as we talk about what you can do as a company, right? And when you look at what we do in R&D -- I mean, I take some offense when people call me a dumb rock or my company a dumb rock and we can't figure this stuff out, right? We have a very expensive but valuable R&D effort that we invest in every year. We have all the relationships with the largest customers in the world. We have a very good road map of where they would like to do, and what they would like to go to, and what we can actually provide. And what we can do to provide, as a public company that cares about not only revenue growth, but earnings growth, right? So there might be others who talk about that they can go do everything. They can -- they offer the amazing technology, which they do, right? We're in the same spots. But remember, you have to keep in mind then scale, right? And when you -- the smaller you are, the more difficult it is to branch out. And you are more inclined to take one-off R&D efforts that sound like amazing opportunities, but you have to really think these things out. And we've made some great steps in the past. Security would be a great example, and we've made some missteps along with that, right? And so I think in general, what we have found is some of these things, while they make a lot of sense, there's no way to monetize, right? And so -- or maybe the monetization of it doesn't warrant the amount of investments that you have to do to keep that thing current and live and everything else. So look, I applaud that this industry is going to do great, right? And I think that Akamai, because of our fact that we are not just content with earnings growth that is double-digit earning growth and the excitement around that. We have a strong ambition in the company to get back to double-digit revenue growth. And when we look at where we are today...

So I got a question from the audience. Let me intercede here. So one of the people in the audience wants to know if you would quantify your market share in each of your business section and how you think your market share is trending.

Yes. I mean, again, that's what Gartners and Forresters get paid for. I mean I think we have a much better view of what happens in the CDN industry than people would expect. But I mean, again, if you think about the CDN industry, you have Netflix on its own is a big chunk. They do that themselves. You have Google, which does a big chunk of YouTube. They do that by themselves. And then there's the all other pie. And Akamai is the dominant player. We've always been the dominant player in that space. Now there is a rising tide of traffic. And over the last few years, there has been an awareness of the customer to split a little bit more. I think as customers move forward through this process of splitting more, I think they come to a realization that over time, maybe that's not the best model for them, and they begin to re-restrict, like I talked about with OTT, the number of vendors they use, right? And so -- but again, the CDN industry-wide, it's so hard to scale and make money is that the customer has a lot of power in this, right? They can move traffic around with little pain. But why Akamai does so well is that we are the most global, the most reliable, and we scale better than anyone, particularly around new use cases.

So very high share. Are you -- is your share trending up, down? Think you're flat?

Well, again, I mean, I guess -- I mean there are certainly other competitors that are winning some share. They're winning some share maybe at the expense of others. I think we're increasing share, personally. But I know what's going on behind the scenes and when you're winning it on OTT, you're winning on gaming. Software downloads, again, we had a very strong software download quarter. So we're taking it from someone as well, but you also have this rising tide element, right? And so -- and I think about -- when you look at what we do in the CDN industry on just like pure revenue, it's bigger. It's bigger than any of the other competitors. But the overachievement that we had in Q1 was much more substantial than the overachievement that some of these other companies are being handsomely rewarded for. But again, I don't -- I don't want...

Tom, we've got to break here. We've overrun 40. Look, I appreciate your time, and appreciate everybody who logged into this. Thank you very much, and have a good -- great of the day. Thanks.

Thank you, Alex. Thank you, everyone. Stay healthy.