The Akamai Innovation Tour: A Journey in Perspective and Partnership

“What does innovation mean to you?” I stare at the prompt in my event registration app, feeling like I’ve just been asked to define the meaning of life. For once, I’m at a complete loss for words — there are just too many ways to answer this question.

The marketer in me wanted to spout some corporate jargon about shattering the bonds of convention to create dynamic new synergies, but that felt like a mouthful of hot garbage. I needed perspective to answer this question properly, and the Akamai Innovation Tour was the perfect place to find it.

The Innovation Tour is when Akamai’s top global customers and partners converge for a week of thought leadership, collaboration, and connection, so if I was going to find inspiration, this was the time to do it. Being invited was a huge honor, especially as a newcomer from the Noname Security acquisition, and I was eager to see the bigger picture beyond API security.

I am also the new host of the Akamai Partner Champions podcast, so the Innovation Tour was also a golden opportunity to capture live partner interviews and hear firsthand about the triumphs and tribulations of the broader partner ecosystem.

I’ve worked with value-added resellers (VARs) for decades, but hearing from independent software vendors (ISVs), technology service distributors (TSDs), and other fun acronyms used to describe partners would give me valuable insights to enhance the partnership experience in my humble fiefdom.

The Innovation Tour kicked off on Monday at Akamai headquarters in Boston with the stadium seating packed to the rafters. Akamai CEO and Co-Founder Tom Leighton took the stage to share our vision and strategy for the coming year, followed by a demo of the new Firewall for AI product.

Even as an AI novice, I was floored by this real-time demonstration because it exemplified how we’re innovating the fight against new and emerging threats.

I’m often asked what I like most about working for Akamai. Besides the perks of hosting podcasts and being in commercials, I love the academic mindset that permeates our culture. With a well-respected MIT professor as our co-founder and CEO — not to mention dozens of PhDs throughout our company — our strategies are backed by mountains of data and thoughtful deliberation.

While reflecting on that lingering innovation prompt, I realized that data-driven decisions and the expertise of multiple subject matter experts are the foundation of innovation. Identify a problem, put a bunch of wicked smart people on it, and voilà — Akamai Firewall for AI. These opening sessions felt like I’d taken a dose of the Limitless pill and the bigger picture of Akamai had started to come into focus.

As we broke for lunch, I stepped away to set up my podcast studio for my interview with Patrick Jamal, CEO of Maxima Consulting. I was intrigued by Maxima Consulting because they cracked the code to make buying complex infrastructure simpler for customers.

To settle my pre-interview jitters, I popped outside to grab some air and I bumped into Patrick. I think we were both nervous ahead of the interview and we ended up shooting the breeze for 30 minutes about our favorite Boston restaurants, weather that is trying to kill us, and our favorite quotes from The Simpsons (“I wish someone would call me ‘sir’ without adding ‘you’re making a scene.’”).

I often feel intimidated interviewing CEOs who represent the pinnacle of professional success, but after our chat, it felt like we were old friends. With the pre-interview butterflies thoroughly squashed, we had a great time talking shop, music, and life goals on the podcast.

The still unanswered prompt popped back into my head because this pre-interview chat with Patrick reminded me of how important relationships are to innovation. You can have the best ideas in the world but without the people to support it, it’s just dead air. 

After a few shared Simpsons quotes, we’d made a connection, and my head was brimming with new ideas for ways to tell our partnership story. I definitely owe him a Flaming Moe the next time we’re at Universal Studios.

The Tour continued on Tuesday with the Partner Advisory Board, at which partners specializing in services, security, cloud, and delivery gathered to share feedback and gain insights into our channel go-to-market strategy. Most of my professional experience has been in organizations that tout a 100% channel go-to-market motion, so I was interested to hear how partners perceived our new channel-first strategy.

The incisive feedback from our partners was the final piece I needed to answer the innovation question. Feedback is rarely easy — it takes courage to give and humility to receive. It’s tempting to operate in a vacuum and think you have all the answers, but our partners are the ones in the trenches, seeing these complex challenges up close every day. To innovate, we need that feedback to transform the status quo into something better.

With my head brimming with ideas and my LinkedIn full of new connection requests, I reopened the event app, ready to tackle the question. What does innovation mean to me? “Innovation means using a foundation of well-researched data, strong relationships, and cogent feedback to create new and better ways of doing things,” I wrote.

Feeling proud of myself (especially for using the word cogent), I hit Post and immediately received an error — apparently my answer was due before the Innovation Tour started.

Well, you either succeed or you learn — and although I failed miserably at answering the prompt on time, the experience was invigorating, and I’m more excited than ever to innovate with our partners.

If you’re as inspired as I am by the power of innovation and partnership, the journey continues. Follow the Akamai Partner Program on LinkedIn and subscribe to the Akamai Partner Champions podcast for more innovative insights and fun partner stories.