Akamai and CCBN.com Expand Strategic Relationship to Webcast Audio and Video Conference Calls to Online Investors
Over the past year, CCBN.com has experienced a 300% increase in the number of Webcasts it has delivered for public companies that are embracing this new medium as a cost-effective and efficient way to get their message out to investors. Over the next year, CCBN.com expects to Webcast approximately 10,000 investor conference calls for its customer base. By leveraging Akamai's interactive streaming media solutions that combine live audio and video streaming of conference calls with presentation slides, instantaneous text messaging and interactive electronic polls, CCBN.com will be able to aggressively meet the rapidly growing customer demand for Webcast services, as well as expand its efforts in areas such as virtual audio and video conferences.
Under the agreement, CCBN.com will continue to use Akamai's leading streaming technologies to provide both institutional and individual investors with access to conference calls conducted by publicly traded companies. In addition to distributing conference calls onto the desktops of thousands of institutional investors through its StreetEvents network, CCBN.com has recently set up a number of distribution channels for these Webcast events with leading individual investor Web sites. These sites include, America Online's Personal Finance Channel, Yahoo! Finance, and S&P PersonalWealth.com. This increase in distribution channels was a key driver behind CCBN.com's decision to expand its relationship with Akamai.
"Combined, CCBN and Akamai will take corporate-investor communications to a new level of timeliness, reach and interactivity, delivering fully automated, scalable and reliable technology that helps provide users with the best online Webcast experience possible," said George Conrades, chairman and CEO of Akamai. "CCBN represents one of our largest customer relationships for the use of Akamai's Webcasting services."
"Partnering with Akamai dramatically advances CCBN's efforts to use the Internet to facilitate direct communications between companies and investors," said Rob Adler, president of CCBN.com. "By offering public companies a cost-efficient way to deliver timely information to a broad audience, we can start to remove the noise and obstacles that exist between companies and their investors, and give them direct access to one another."
This new announcement comes at a time when the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is encouraging companies to use the Internet to open up their conference calls to all investors. Until recently, the vast majority of conference calls were restricted to financial analysts and major institutional investors, often at the exclusion of individual investors. The SEC has recently proposed Regulation FD (Fair Disclosure) which would change this selective disclosure practice. Offering all investors the opportunity to listen to quarterly conference calls in real-time over the Web is consistent with this SEC initiative.
About CCBN.com
Founded in 1997 by Jeff Parker, creator of First Call, CCBN.com is the global leader in enabling direct communications between public companies and the investment community over the Internet. Through IR Online, the company's suite of Web-based communications services, CCBN provides more than 1,400 public companies with a customized and cost-effective outsourced investor relations solution. StreetEvents (www.streetevents.com), CCBN.com's event management service, offers investors access to the most comprehensive calendar of investment-related events and webcasts available to the financial community. Through partnerships with leading retail financial portals, CCBN.com delivers an unprecedented body of direct corporate information to one of the largest collective audience in cyberspace.
About Akamai
Akamai is the foremost provider of distributed content, streaming media, and applications delivery services and serves over 1,000 customers. Akamai has the broadest deployment of servers for content, streaming media, and applications delivery with more than 3,000 servers in over 45 countries directly connected to more than 160 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 Annual Report on Form 10-K and other documents periodically filed with the SEC.
| Contacts: |
||
| Lynn Little CCBN.com 617-850-7900 llittle@ccbn.com |
--or-- | Anjeanette Rettig Akamai Technologies 858-909-3134 anjeanette.rettig@akamai.com |
Deal Signals Companies' Belief in the Continued Growth of Webcast Services in the Shareholder Communications Industry
CAMBRIDGE and BOSTON, MA, May 15, 2000- Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the foremost provider of global, high-performance services for the delivery of interactive Web content, streaming media, and Internet applications, and CCBN.com (www.ccbn.com), the leading provider of online investor relations services to publicly traded corporations, announced today a one-year expansion of their existing streaming media agreement. Akamai has provided CCBN.com with streaming media solutions for more than a year, enabling CCBN.com's client base of over 1,400 public companies to broadcast investor-related conference calls and meetings live over the Internet. The expanded streaming deal makes CCBN.com one of Akamai's largest streaming media customers.Over the past year, CCBN.com has experienced a 300% increase in the number of Webcasts it has delivered for public companies that are embracing this new medium as a cost-effective and efficient way to get their message out to investors. Over the next year, CCBN.com expects to Webcast approximately 10,000 investor conference calls for its customer base. By leveraging Akamai's interactive streaming media solutions that combine live audio and video streaming of conference calls with presentation slides, instantaneous text messaging and interactive electronic polls, CCBN.com will be able to aggressively meet the rapidly growing customer demand for Webcast services, as well as expand its efforts in areas such as virtual audio and video conferences.
Under the agreement, CCBN.com will continue to use Akamai's leading streaming technologies to provide both institutional and individual investors with access to conference calls conducted by publicly traded companies. In addition to distributing conference calls onto the desktops of thousands of institutional investors through its StreetEvents network, CCBN.com has recently set up a number of distribution channels for these Webcast events with leading individual investor Web sites. These sites include, America Online's Personal Finance Channel, Yahoo! Finance, and S&P PersonalWealth.com. This increase in distribution channels was a key driver behind CCBN.com's decision to expand its relationship with Akamai.
"Combined, CCBN and Akamai will take corporate-investor communications to a new level of timeliness, reach and interactivity, delivering fully automated, scalable and reliable technology that helps provide users with the best online Webcast experience possible," said George Conrades, chairman and CEO of Akamai. "CCBN represents one of our largest customer relationships for the use of Akamai's Webcasting services."
"Partnering with Akamai dramatically advances CCBN's efforts to use the Internet to facilitate direct communications between companies and investors," said Rob Adler, president of CCBN.com. "By offering public companies a cost-efficient way to deliver timely information to a broad audience, we can start to remove the noise and obstacles that exist between companies and their investors, and give them direct access to one another."
This new announcement comes at a time when the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is encouraging companies to use the Internet to open up their conference calls to all investors. Until recently, the vast majority of conference calls were restricted to financial analysts and major institutional investors, often at the exclusion of individual investors. The SEC has recently proposed Regulation FD (Fair Disclosure) which would change this selective disclosure practice. Offering all investors the opportunity to listen to quarterly conference calls in real-time over the Web is consistent with this SEC initiative.
About CCBN.com
Founded in 1997 by Jeff Parker, creator of First Call, CCBN.com is the global leader in enabling direct communications between public companies and the investment community over the Internet. Through IR Online, the company's suite of Web-based communications services, CCBN provides more than 1,400 public companies with a customized and cost-effective outsourced investor relations solution. StreetEvents (www.streetevents.com), CCBN.com's event management service, offers investors access to the most comprehensive calendar of investment-related events and webcasts available to the financial community. Through partnerships with leading retail financial portals, CCBN.com delivers an unprecedented body of direct corporate information to one of the largest collective audience in cyberspace.
About Akamai
Akamai is the foremost provider of distributed content, streaming media, and applications delivery services and serves over 1,000 customers. Akamai has the broadest deployment of servers for content, streaming media, and applications delivery with more than 3,000 servers in over 45 countries directly connected to more than 160 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 Annual Report on Form 10-K and other documents periodically filed with the SEC.
