Akamai Technologies, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q2 2021 Akamai Technologies, Inc. Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Tom Barth, Investor Relations for Akamai Technologies. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining Akamai's second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Speaking today will be Tom Layton, Akamai's Chief Executive Officer, and Ed McGowan, Akamai's Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, please note that today's comments include forward-looking statements, including statements regarding revenue and earnings guidance. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties and involve a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements. The factors include uncertainty stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic and any impact from unexpected geopolitical developments. Additional information concerning these factors is contained in Akamai's filings with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. The forward-looking statements included in this call represent the company's view on August 3rd, 2021. Akamai disclaims any obligation to update these statements to reflect future events or circumstances. As a reminder, we'll be referring to some non-GAAP financial metrics during today's call. A detailed reconciliation of gap and non-gap metrics can be found under the financial portion of the investor relations section at Akamai.com. And with that, let me turn the call over to Tom.

Thanks, Tom, and thank you all for joining us today. I'm pleased to report that Akamai delivered excellent financial results in the second quarter, coming in at or above the high end of our guidance range for both revenue and EPS. Q2 revenue was $853 million, up 7% year-over-year and up 5% in constant currency. Non-GAAP operating margin in Q2 was 32%, which reflects our continued focus on operational efficiency, even as we've continued to invest for future growth. Q2 non-GAAP EPS was $1.42 per diluted share, up 3% year-over-year. Akamai Security Solutions continued to perform especially well in Q2, generating revenue of $325 million, up 25% year-over-year, and up 22% in constant currency. Cyber attacks generated headlines throughout the first half of the year, and our strong growth reflects the criticality of security to organizations in every sector and geography of the world. Akamai is increasingly recognized as a security leader that offers not just innovative and market-leading solutions, but also insights into an enormous amount of internet data and threat intelligence, a massive distributed platform at the edge of the internet where most attacks originate, and the technical expertise of one of the industry's largest and most experienced teams of security professionals. The strong growth of our security portfolio was driven by several product lines. including our market-leading solutions for web app firewall, bot management, DDoS prevention, and access control. Our recently released Akamai Page Integrity Manager continued to have rapid adoption in Q2. Page Integrity Manager helps businesses protect their users from having credit card data or other personal information stolen by malware embedded in third-party content. It's also designed to prevent user data from being intentionally or inadvertently sent to third parties, such as advertisers or social networks, which can result in a violation of privacy laws and steep fines. As an example, one of our customers is a leading furniture retailer. Page Integrity Manager detected that one of their partners, a major social media platform, was taking their shopper's email addresses in violation of their data privacy rules. Page Integrity Manager blocks such transfers of personal data and immediately notifies our customers so that appropriate business actions can be taken. In June, we entered beta with a related solution that we call Audience Hijacking Protection. Audience Hijacking Protection is designed to detect and block malicious or unwanted activity from client-side plugins, browser extensions, and malware. For example, it can quickly identify vulnerable resources, detect suspicious behavior, and block unwanted ads, pop-ups, affiliate fraud, and other malicious activities that attempt to hijack a retailer's audience. Initial customer interest in this new capability is very strong. Akamai Bot Manager also continued to perform very well in Q2. with revenue growing 40% year-over-year. Bot Manager now has nearly 800 customers with an annualized revenue run rate of nearly $200 million. Our customers use Bot Manager to thwart a variety of unwanted activities and attacks, such as price scraping, inventory manipulation, credential stuffing, and account takeover. Recently, we enhanced our ability to defend against account takeover attempts with a beta launch of Akamai Account Protector. It's designed to proactively identify and block human fraudulent activity using advanced machine learning, behavioral analytics, and reputation heuristics. Account Protector intelligently evaluates every login request to determine if it's coming from a legitimate user or an impersonator. Q2 bookings were also strong for our Perlexic service, which helps organizations defend against the surge of ransom DDoS attacks that began in Q3 of last year. As an example, a leading financial analytics company recently adopted Perlexic to protect them from this growing threat. Prior to that, the company faced operational and technical challenges from needing to manage multiple security technologies from various niche vendors and cloud service providers. Since consolidating with Akamai, they have greatly benefited from reduced complexity, improved security, and greater consistency for compliance and risk management across their many business units. As you all likely know, there have been widespread ransomware, data theft, and other malware attacks against major enterprises this year. Included were well-publicized attacks on critical infrastructure at a major pipeline company, the world's largest meatpacker, and a freight operator that serves as the lifeline for two popular island destinations in New England. The need to stop these kinds of attacks is driving organizations to adopt new zero-trust and secure access service edge, or SASE, solutions, such as those offered by Akamai. For example, when the Exchange server attack hit thousands of organizations in March, Akamai's email wasn't compromised because our IT department uses Akamai's enterprise application access solution, which prevented unauthorized access to our Exchange server. Our access control suite of products continued to be Akamai's fastest growing security segment in Q2, with revenue up 161% year-over-year, including the acquisition of Asavi, and up 57% on an organic basis. As one example of a new customer, we closed a large security contract in Q2 with a company that helps maritime operators manage risk. This company has thousands of employees and hundreds of offices throughout the world. They adopted our enterprise application access and Kona Site Defender solutions to secure the access to their applications and to protect their internal systems from malware and other threats. I'll now turn to our CDN portfolio, which generated revenue of $528 million in Q2, down 1% year-over-year and 4% in constant currency. This result was in line with our expectations and reflects the challenging comparison against last year's pandemic-related jump in traffic and the loss of revenue from Chinese applications that were banned from India in July of 2020. Traffic on our platform remains strong in Q2, with peaks exceeding 130 terabits per second every day throughout the quarter. This enormous amount of traffic provides strong evidence of how much customers relied on our platform's unparalleled scale and reach, which is enabled by more than 4,200 points of presence at the edge. in 135 countries around the world. Our tremendous global presence is especially important to the world's major broadcasters who continue to look to Akamai to deliver the world's most significant events. For example, during the recent European football tournament, the peak traffic that we delivered globally for more than 30 broadcasters was 35 terabits per second, nearly five times the peak observed in 2016. Our fast-growing edge application segment delivered $47 million in Q2, up 35% year-over-year, and up 32% in constant currency. This rapid growth rate reflects the shift of compute workloads from core data centers, on-prem or in the cloud, to our edge platform for offload, improved performance, security, and global scale. For example, each time a user accesses one of our retailer customer sites, The retailer's geolocation code is executed on an Akamai Edge server to identify the user's location and then deliver content tailored for that location. Overall, we're now supporting an average of 5 billion such Edge computing instantiations per day on our platforms. In summary, I'm pleased to report that we've executed according to the plan we outlined for investors during our February analyst day. In particular, we've continued to achieve strong demand from customers for our security and edge computing solutions, diversification of our business across products, geographies, and sales channels, and strong financial performance on both the top and bottom lines. Before turning the call over to Ed, I'd like to formally welcome Sharon Bowen to our board of directors. Sharon's had extensive experience in financial and securities transactions for large global companies, and we're very much looking forward to benefiting from her engagement and counsel. In addition, as many of you know, our board is now chaired by Dan Hesse, who succeeded Fred Salerno in June. Dan has held senior management positions in the telco industry for many years. including as CEO of Sprint. He's also recognized as a leader in ESG and is providing valuable advice and oversight to our senior management team. Of course, we all deeply appreciate Fred's many years of outstanding leadership and service to Akamai, and we wish him the very best in his future endeavors. I'll now turn the call over to Ed to provide further details on our Q2 results and our outlook for next quarter and the full year. Ed?