Content delivery specialist Akamai Technologies has promoted William (Bill) E. Weihl to CTO, a vacancy created by the untimely death of Daniel Lewin in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Since then, a group of individuals has overseen research, development and engineering tasks.
"Bill Weihl has demonstrated that he has the experience and technological vision for the job," Jeff Young, an Akamai spokesman told internetnews.com.
He declined to say whether Akamai, of Cambridge, Mass., looked outside the company.
Weihl has been at Akamai since 1999 when he was hired as a technical lead for technology partnerships. Soon after, he was appointed chief architect for Akamai's content delivery services organization. Working with cofounder and chief scientist Tom Leighton, Weihl developed custom offerings for enterprise and government customers.
Prior to Akamai, Weihl was a senior consulting engineer at Compaq's Systems Research Center. He led the design and development of Digital's Continuous Profiling Infrastructure, an innovation that has led to 19 patents.
Weihl has also served as a tenured associate professor of computer science at MIT and has been recognized for his research on distributed and parallel computing, with results in transaction processing and parallel programming languages.
Lewin cofounded the company with Leighton. He was a passenger aboard American Airlines Flight 11 that was hijacked out of Boston's Logan Airport and crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. He was 31.
CEO George Conrades has said the best tribute to Lewin's legacy would be the continued success of the company.
