Lumen is to shut down its Content Delivery Network (CDN) business and has sold its customer contracts to Akamai.
Terms of the deal were not shared.
Lumen and Akamai will operate under a transition services agreement for 90 days, after which time Lumen plans to wind down its content delivery services.
"We are deep into our transformation of Lumen and much of our core work involves simplification of our business," said Bob McCarthy, Lumen SVP, business development.
"The sale of select Lumen CDN service contracts enables us to apply even more focus on disrupting the telecommunications industry by cloudifying our network, enhancing our Quantum Fiber offering, and bringing amazing new solutions to market."
In its own announcement, Akamai said it had acquired assets, including select content delivery customer contracts, from Lumen Technologies. The company said it anticipates the transaction will add approximately $40–50 million in revenue.
The transaction does not include the acquisition of Lumen personnel or technology.
“As these new customers come on to Akamai Connected Cloud, they will not only have a reliable, best-in-class delivery solution for their ongoing needs, they will also have the opportunity to tap into the full portfolio of Akamai solutions to help them power and protect their businesses into the future,” said Adam Karon, chief operating officer and general manager of Akamai’s cloud technology group.
On its website, Lumen said its CDN network spanned more than 2,400 Edge servers in 95 PoPs in 40 countries for 170Tbps total delivery capacity.
This is the second such deal Akamai has made in recent months. In August, Akamai acquired around 100 CDN customers from Stackpath as the latter company announced it would be ceasing operations for its StackPath CDN and Highwinds CDN services from November. Akamai said that deal would add approximately $20 million in revenue by 2024.
Lumen can track its roots back to the 1940s and the Oak Ridge Telephone Company – later Century Telephone Enterprises and then CenturyLink. The company changed its name to Lumen in 2020.
Some of Lumen’s CDN business can be traced back to Savvis, which was bought by Level3 in 2007; Level3 later merged with CenturyLink. The Savvis CDN services business was initially developed by Sandpiper Networks, and subsequently owned by Digital Island and Cable & Wireless before Savvis acquired it.
