Akamai Appoints Kumud Kalia As CIO

Akamai Technologies, Inc., the cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing userexperiences on any device, anywhere, has announced the appointment of Kumud Kalia as Chief Information Officer.

Kalia will be responsible for leading the global strategy, development, and operation of the applications and infrastructure that support Akamai’s business processes. His focus will be on creating an agile and efficient user experience for Akamai’s customers, employees, and partners. Kalia will report to Paul Sagan, Akamai President and CEO.

An engineer and experienced CIO, Kalia most recently ran the Information Services organisation for Direct Energy, an energy and services business operating in the U.S. and Canada with over $10 billion in revenue.

“Kumud brings great passion andexperience to the role of CIO, and we are fortunate to add him to our management team,” Sagan said. “As an innovative and strategic business leader, Kumud’s expertise includes managing high performing IT and operations teams for companies experiencing rapid growth and requiring significant scale across multiple business units. His proven ability to execute on business transformation initiatives for today’s hyperconnected world is a perfect fit for Akamai’s next stage of growth," he said.

“Akamai has experienced tremendous growth, and I am delighted to be joining this impressive company at such anexciting time of expansion and innovation,” Kalia said. “Akamai is helping enterprises leverage the Internet to create real change in the areas of cloud, mobile, security, and media. As CIO, my goal will be to continue to optimise our internal processes to support Akamai’s world-class operations and growing employee and customer bases," he added.

Prior to joining Direct Energy, Kalia was Vice President and CIO of the Business Markets Group of Qwest Communications International. Formerly CIO for Dresdner Group in North America, he has also performed in technology, operations and strategy roles at various investment banks.
Kalia holds an honors degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Wales and is a chartered engineer. He was named by Computerworld as ‘Best in Class’ among the Premier 100 IT Leaders for 2008, and has led teams that received CIO 100 and InfoWorld 100 awards for technology innovation in business.

Kalia will be based in Akamai’s San Mateo, CA, office.