Akamai Technologies Inc, a content delivery network (CDN) and security service, is expanding its investment in Thailand to capitalise on digital transformation opportunities and the rise of internet streaming.
"The digitisation boom, thanks to a healthy push by the government and disruptive technology in many sectors, has driven internet network performance to become more crucial to companies," said Ashutosh Kulkarni, senior vice-president and general manager of the web experience division.
Thais registered the world's highest time spent on the internet last year, at 9.38 hours a day, and ranked in the top 10 for social media users and growth of the Internet of Things (IoT).
"There's enormous opportunity here and Thailand is a strategic country, one of the largest potential revenue generators in Asia-Pacific, in addition to China, Japan and India," Mr Kulkarni said. "The company has expanded its servers and local partners in Asia-Pacific, including Thailand, over the past two years.
"Financial institutes, broadcasting, car sharing, e-commerce, social media, including new entrepreneurs and startups, are our key target users, as our CDN can help them accelerate their web performance."
Akamai's services help boost performance by 50-500%, depending on applications and context.
By maintaining low latency, the service helps those sectors better enhance the user experience, Mr Kulkarni said.
"Users will turn away if a website takes too much time, like 20 seconds, to load," he said.
The company has 250,000 servers globally, of which more than 2,000 are in Thailand. The company's local partners are World Information Technology and True Corporation.
Over the past decade, Akamai's CDN service has been driven by software and file downloads. But recently, traffic has been pushed by web performance, internet streaming and over-the-top operators.
The company predicts that market opportunities in Thailand will double in two years and increase by 10 times over the next seven years, thanks to the country' GDP growth, internet usage and investment from telecom operators, particularly with the imminent 5G roll-out.
The forecast calls for Thailand's fixed broadband for individuals to increase from average speeds of 13.3 megabits per second to 30Mbps.
Mr Kulkarni said cloud security is another growing trend because of increasing cyberthreats, which are expected to grow by 30 times within five years from 50 gigabits per second to 1.3 terabits per second.
According to Akamai's fourth-quarter 2017 internet security report, 7.3 trillion bot requests are made globally each month. The Ponemon Institute said cyber-attacks can cost a business US$2.7 million (84.2 million baht) annually.
The company also found that attackers use IoT devices like CCTV and baby monitors as tools for distributed denial of service attacks.
"We have bot management technology to detect suspicious activity that employs machine learning," Mr Kulkarni said.
Akamai is also looking at autonomous vehicles, using the cloud service network to connect those cars.
Akamai revenue totalled $2.5 billion in 2017, with cloud security service contributing $482 million.