Cambridge, MA - September 4, 2001 - Akamai Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM), the leading provider of distributed application and content delivery services, today announced the continued industry adoption of Edge Side Includes (ESI), an open markup language co-developed by Akamai, Oracle, and other industry leaders to define Web page fragments for dynamic aggregation, assembly, and delivery at the Internet's "edge." Systems integrators and technology consulting providers AGENCY.COM, BURNdevelopment, Fort Point Partners, Kanda Software, <kpe>, Lead Dog Digital, and Plexus Technologies, are among the first companies to be trained and certified to implement ESI, extending the performance and cost-saving benefits of dynamic content and applications assembly to their customers.

"The centralized model of Web serving has shifted towards more efficient infrastructure technologies that leverage the Internet's edge for distributed computing. As a result, the development of ESI is one such technology that will greatly impact the way enterprise applications are written and deployed in the future," said Michael Ruffolo, executive vice president, Akamai. "Expanding the ecosystem of companies that share Akamai's vision for ESI will help to ultimately make the implementation of edge delivery services a natural step for enterprises."

Akamai provides a range of training and certification programs that enable systems integrators and technology consulting providers to build offerings for their customers that leverage ESI and Akamai's EdgeSuite^SM service. As businesses continue to outsource certain infrastructure requirements to cost-effectively enhance performance, scalability, and reliability, Akamai-certified systems integrators can realize a competitive advantage by developing and maintaining industry-leading expertise in ESI implementation across multiple application server and content management systems.

Most Web pages today are generated on demand for individual users and contain a mix of personalized and non-personalized content fragments, making them non-cacheable by traditional caching products and content delivery network (CDN) services. Announced on April 30, and recently published as a W3C Note, the ESI language enables dynamic assembly of these page fragments. As a result, businesses now can develop highly dynamic Web-based applications that are assembled at the edge of the data center, or at the edge of the Internet, for improved performance. Leveraging ESI, the Akamai EdgeSuite service enables the generation and delivery of dynamic content by constructing Web pages from component pieces that can be targeted and delivered from locations optimized for each end user.

Systems Integrators Support ESI

"Our goal is to help our clients achieve the best user experience for their constituents," said Timothy Appnel, director of technology, AGENCY.COM. "We need to provide the capability for high performance delivery of rich dynamic Web functionality in a reliable manner and ESI allows us to do this."

"Working with Akamai to leverage ESI enables us to create Web sites for our customers that minimize their infrastructure requirements," said Mark Zilbert, director of client relations, BURNdevelopment. "Our Akamai certification as integrators of this next-generation Internet infrastructure technology allows us to provide our U.S. and international clients with cost-effective and reliable content distribution and localization."

"Fort Point's clients are focused on one thing: Return On Investment. Working with ESI supports both sides of the ROI equation. On the revenue side, improved performance leads directly to higher levels of customer satisfaction and resulting revenue improvements," said John Strain, executive vice president of solutions, Fort Point Partners. "On the cost side, ESI reduces both the cost and complexity of deploying next-generation Web applications, while adding the benefits of on-demand scalability, interoperability across multiple vendors, and support for existing applications."

"By collaborating with Akamai to take advantage of ESI, Kanda will ensure that, in addition to our comprehensive range of offerings, customers will have the ability to reliably deliver dynamic content and Web applications," said Levi Glozman, vice president of development, Kanda Software. "ESI enables application server, content management server and content delivery technologies to integrate seamlessly, enhancing the total performance of truly dynamic Web pages and applications from the edge of the Internet."

"At <kpe>, ESI gives our clients a distinct and significant competitive advantage in reliably delivering rich aggregates of personalized content and services," said Charles Wood, chief technology officer, <kpe>. "The ease with which the technology can be integrated and deployed, coupled with the performance improvements and operational efficiencies that result from pushing application processing to the edge of the network, makes ESI a truly compelling offering."

"We see great value in extending the benefits of ESI and EdgeSuite to our customers, who will begin to realize performance improvements, bandwidth savings and increased infrastructure efficiencies," said Mike Matteo, chief executive officer, Lead Dog Digital. "We're excited to work with Akamai in our on-going efforts to add value to our offerings that optimize performance for our e-business and financial services customers."

"Plexus Technologies offers a broad array of value-chain integration services and solutions that help our enterprise clients focus on their core competencies by extending relevant information and transactional capability across key partner, supplier and customer channels. Now with the benefits of ESI, we see our relationship with Akamai as an integral final piece of this strategy, helping enterprise clients to extend information through rich and dynamic portal applications in a high-performance, high-availability and cost effective manor," said Jeffrey Ford, director of North American sales, Plexus Technologies. "ESI represents an important step towards how dynamic Web applications will be deployed in the future and, through training and certification, we're ready to pass on these compelling cost and performance advantages to our customers."

For more information on ESI, please visit www.esi.org.

About Akamai
Akamai is the leading provider of distributed application and content delivery services. These services enable companies to reduce the complexity and cost of deploying and operating a uniform Web infrastructure while ensuring unmatched performance, reliability, scalability and manageability. Akamai's services give businesses a distinct competitive advantage and provide an unparalleled Internet experience for their customers. Akamai's intelligent edge platform for content, streaming media, and application delivery comprises more than 11,600 servers within over 820 networks in 62 countries. With headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Akamai provides services to companies worldwide. For information on Delivering a Better Internet^SM, visit www.akamai.com.

Akamai Statement Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act
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.

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