00:00We have to start with the market reaction. As I said, down 14%. That looks to be your worst day
00:05in about a year here. I mean, what do you think was really the key point here that the market
00:12seized upon when you take a look at your results and really at the industry broadly, which has
00:18certainly been going through a rough patch? Yeah, our sector got hit pretty hard today,
00:23and we got hit along with it. That said, even after today's sell-off, we're up 10% for the
00:29year, which is pretty good in this market. And the analyst reports coming out now, based on our
00:35performance in the quarter and our guidance for the year, actually quite positive, with several
00:39raising their price targets on Akamai for the year by $10 or $15 or more. And I think we have
00:46tremendous prospects led by our cloud infrastructure services. You know what Matt just said on the
00:52segment a minute ago, AI is here, and it's real. And we see it in our customer base,
00:58and our cloud infrastructure services grew at 45% in Q4, and we're guiding to 45% to 50%
01:06this year.
01:07And that's driven by our AI inference cloud, which is the distributed infrastructure to support all
01:13the AI applications and agents that our customers are embedding.
01:18And so, I mean, why do you think that the market is missing that at this moment, that message there
01:23that, you know, you're not going to be disrupted? You're actually harnessing AI. I mean, do you just
01:28chalk that up to macro factors? Or, you know, is there something that, you know, would be better
01:34communicated here?
01:36Yeah, I think there sometimes is a little confusion about AI, because it means so many things to
01:40different people. You know, and in fact, the more there's disruption of the SaaS marketplace,
01:46really, the more it helps Akamai. You know, our security services are not disrupted by AI,
01:53because they're embedded in our platform that is needed to defend enterprises. And so we're not
02:01vulnerable to that kind of disruption. Moreover, as enterprises do take more capabilities in-house
02:08with SaaS, they need to run that on an infrastructure, and our inference cloud is the perfect infrastructure.
02:15But is there any risk, though, Tom, though, as the AI buildout continues, that we start to say,
02:20maybe potentially see a replacement, not like a wholesale replacement, but alternatives to that
02:25infrastructure, whether it's through some of the things Alphabet is trying to build, or whether it's
02:29obviously some of these new coding, you know, coding sort of scripts that we're hearing from
02:34Anthropic that can maybe do some of the security stuff on its own, in a way, independent of the
02:39structure?
02:40Yeah, I think you're going to see that. But that doesn't replace the infrastructure. You know,
02:46our platform that's located in, you know, 4,000 plus pops in 700 cities, which when it comes to
02:53security, you need that kind of distributed infrastructure to stop the attacks from getting
02:58close to your data center, or you just get overwhelmed. Moreover, as those SaaS applications
03:04are developed, they got to run on some.
03:08Well, one thing I am curious about, too, and particularly given not just Akamai, but given
03:12your personal background, I mean, you have kind of been at the forefront of the development of
03:16cybersecurity tools, and just really kind of the booming of the internet coming out of your work in
03:21the late 70s and early 80s. And I am curious if the structure of the internet as we know it
03:26today,
03:27whether there's an argument to be made that it should start to be walled off to a certain extent,
03:32because of some of these security concerns.
03:35I think the structure is going to stay there. The protocols are going to change how we use it
03:41will change. There'll be proliferation of agents and apps driven by AI and all sorts of new
03:47capabilities, which are very exciting.
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