Highlights from the Akamai India Partner Summit 2026

They say the true measure of a journey isn’t just the distance traveled, but the company you keep along the way. The energy in the room on May 7, 2026, was a testament to how far we’ve come as a partner community. As I looked out at the faces of our partners gathered for our annual India Partner Summit, I couldn’t help but reflect on our incredible journey.

As Akamai’s Head of India Channel Sales, I left with one clear takeaway: Our future is not just powered by technology; it is powered by our shared vision of excellence and a commitment to being stronger together.

Akamai’s Regional Vice President and India Country Head Mitesh Jain, opened the evening by reinforcing a philosophy that is the bedrock of our business: Akamai is a partner-first company.

Mitesh shared some eye-opening stats that highlight how we’re winning together. Today, Akamai works with 7 of the top 10 companies in financial services, media, and IT services. This incredible success is a direct result of collaboration with our partners. 

He noted that more than 60% of our new business in India today is partner generated. This growth is fueled by our commitment to enabling partners to layer on their own services, a strategy that has fostered deeper customer loyalty and higher retention. This mutually beneficial strategy proves that when you prioritize the channel, the channel drives your success. 

Mani Sundaram, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Akamai’s Security Technology Group, joined us to share a reality check on the security landscape. He highlighted a startling shift in the “exploit window” — the time between when a vulnerability is found and when it is weaponized — which has collapsed from weeks to mere seconds.

To stay ahead, Akamai is doubling down on innovation. As Mani put it: “We are using AI to fight AI.” But he also anchored the conversation in reality, noting that although AI is the new frontier, the fundamentals — web application firewalls (WAFs), microsegmentation, and API security — remain the foundation of a secure digital India. By pairing these essentials with distributed intelligence, we’re moving past simple protection toward true resilience.

When Vijay Krishnamoorthy, Akamai’s Cloud Computing Business Leader in India, took the stage, he brought a mix of humor and high-stakes strategy. He reminded us of Akamai’s invisible but vital role in the daily lives of millions of Indians.

Beyond the anecdotes, Vijay painted a compelling picture of the massive shifting landscape ahead, backed by some illuminating numbers on Akamai's expanding architecture. 

• A massive distributed platform: Built on top of Akamai's network fabric spanning 130 countries and thousands of TBps of capacity, our core cloud infrastructure in India is supported across 2 locations and 3 data centers (Mumbai and Chennai). 

• The AI inference era: Backing up Akamai’s strategic pivot toward the inference space rather than centralized training farms, Vijay shared a powerful quote from NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang: “Inference will be at least a billion times bigger.”

• NVIDIA partnership and Edge scalability: To answer this massive market demand, Akamai has partnered with NVIDIA to build the Akamai distributed inference cloud, which is already live in 19 cities across the world, with a deeper edge-based AI inferencing model currently being tested in 10 locations. 

Vijay emphasized that this is where the real opportunity for our partners lies. With the rapid rise of AI deployment, the demand for localized computing has skyrocketed. He pointed out that by bringing highly scalable GPU availability directly to the edge, Akamai is empowering partners to help customers build, scale, and run heavy AI workloads closer to the end user than ever before, moving far beyond the limits of traditional centralized hyperscalers.

The session that really resonated with me was the partner panel. Hosted by Vijay Kolli (Regional Vice President, Akamai), that session featured a candid discussion with industry leaders Anoop Mohan (Business Head, QuarkWiz), Kunal Bajaj (Chief Business Officer, eSec Forte Technologies), and Ramandeep Singh (Co-Founder and CEO, QOS Technology).

The panelists spoke openly about the evolving market; specifically, that there are still gaps and misconceptions about the threat landscape that make it challenging for customers to prioritize where they should focus their security strategy. They emphasized that for partners to succeed today, they must move beyond selling products and instead build the skills and capabilities necessary to handle complex design issues. 

Perhaps the most important message for me was the reminder that our strategy is a direct reflection of our partners’ feedback. The trust we share is built on that very dialogue. By listening to your front-line insights, we’ve been able to evolve our technology to match the speed of the market. It is this collaborative loop that ensures that you always have the most relevant, cutting-edge tools in your arsenal to solve the challenges of today and tomorrow.