The relationship between content delivery specialist Akamai and its intelligent routing technology spinout Sockeye is growing distant.
"In November 2002, Sockeye completed a secondary round of funding in which Akamai did not participate," Akamai said in its quarterly SEC statement. "In addition, Akamai agreed to the cancellation of its warrant to purchase preferred stock in exchange for shares of common stock of Sockeye."
Following these moves, Akamai's ownership stake has been reduced from 40 percent to 2 percent. As a result, Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai will vacate two seats on Sockeye's board, one of which has been held by Akamai CEO George Conrades.
An Akamai spokesman declined to elaborate on the filing.
For its part, Sockeye, based in Waltham, Mass., made no mention of its former patron in a news release this morning trumpeting a $12 million cash infusion from Baker Capital and Polaris Venture Partners.
But beyond the symbolic, Sockeye last month distanced itself from Akamai with a new data feed to steer traffic on Internet protocol networks around bottlenecks.
At the time, Sockeye said it was always Sockeye's plan to ween itself from Akamai's service. A five-year technology contract, initially signed when Sockeye spun out in 2001, was amended to a monthly deal, Sockeye CEO Valeri Marks said.
But Sockeye voided the service agreement earlier this month. It was lucrative for Akamai, which at one point tallied 11 percent of its income from Sockeye.
Sockeye's Global Route service uses software to analyze data from geographically dispersed servers to map the lowest-cost, best-performance routes for voice, data and video content.
That's important for communications providers and enterprises, especially those who subscribe to two or more Internet services providers, a practice known as multi-homing.
With intelligent routing, users can cut costs by sending non-mission critical data over lower-priced Internet service providers and reducing networks engineering tasks. In addition, they can better guard against denial-of-service attacks by moving traffic to unclogged lines.
Marks said the new backing will be used, in large part, for software development.
