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Akamai Appoints Former Verizon CIO as Chief Information Officer

Akamai Appoints Former Verizon CIO as Chief Information Officer

Web and mobile security company Akamai is bolstering its workforce today with the appointment of a new Chief Information Officer. Starting today, Fari Ebrahimi (pictured) will take on the role, combined with the duties and title of Senior Vice President. Ebrahimi succeeds Kumud Kalia, who will remain with Akamai in an advisory role over the next two months.

Ebrahimi will be responsible for global strategy, development, app operations, and IT infrastructure for Akamai’s customers, employees, and partners. In a press release, Ebrahimi said his goal is to “drive and scale end-to-end digital transformation across all business processes to maximize and secure our customer, partner, and employee experiences, while optimizing operations leveraging Akamai’s world-class solutions.”

Ebrahimi most recently served as SVP and Global CIO of Avaya, a California-based mobile network operator. Prior to that appointment, he spent 13 years working in multiple capacities at Verizon, including as President of Verizon Information Technologies, and as SVP and CIO of Verizon Services Operations, where he was in charge of leading a workforce of almost 4,000.

Discussing Ebrahimi’s strong background, Akamai CEO Dr. Tom Leighton said Ebrahimi “has demonstrated both significant results and cost savings in leading complex enterprise transformations, especially in the areas of cloud, mobile and security. We look forward to combining his talents with our existing strong IT team.”

Akamai was founded in 1998 and most recently presented at FinovateEurope 2015 in London where it debuted Client Reputation Service. The solution helps FIs forecast security issues and protect against DDoS attacks, web attackers, screen scrapers, and scanning tools. In November of last year, the Massachusetts-based company acquired Nominum, a DNS security solutions company. And in October, Akamai teamed up with Bell to offer a suite of web security and performance solutions for Canadian businesses.