Akamai results beat estimates as cloud security drives growth
Akamai Technologies trounced Wall Street's estimates for first-quarter revenue and profit on Monday as its aggressive push to cloud security paid off and traditional business of speeding up content delivery on web stabilized.

Shares of the company rose 4.3 percent to $74.75 in extended trading.

The company's revenue rose 11.4 percent to $668.7 million, beating analysts' estimate of $654 million, with revenue from cloud security business surging 36 percent to $149 million.

But net income fell 28 percent to $53.7 million, or 31 cents per share, in the quarter ended March 31 as the company recorded a $15 million restructuring charge and $23 million related to settlement of a legal dispute.

The company's media content business remained under pressure as large media customers such as Apple and Amazon.com develop in-house capabilities to handle their web traffic.

Revenue from the big six internet platform customers such as Facebook , Microsoft , and Netflix fell 14 percent to $44 million, but the overall media and carrier division revenue rose 6 percent to $316 million.

"We expect it (revenue from big six) to be more or less like that this year, so it will be less than last year but now the declines are much smaller," Chief Executive Officer Tom Leighton told Reuters on a post-earnings call.

"The big six are now less than 7 percent of our revenue overall and they are no longer having the impact on our revenue growth that they did before.

"Excluding items, Akamai earned 79 cents per share, beating analysts' average estimates of 70 cents, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.