Akamai Technologies Inc., whose major clients include Apple and Verizon Wireless, bought Blaze on Wednesday on the strength of its ability to make web browsing faster.
This is particularly important for mobile devices, which have a far lesser capability to render images and other website elements than their desktop counterparts.
"As most of these things happen, there was some discussion about a partnership, which turned into something bigger," said Michael Weider, Blaze's chief executive, in an interview with OBJ.
He said the companies saw many similarities with their respective abilities as well as their customers.
"I think they really saw that (Blaze's) technology was becoming a more and more important part of helping customers to increase the speed of their sites."
Akamai officials were not immediately available Wednesday to comment on the acquisition.
The Ottawa-based company, which employs 13 people, will see all of its workers move over to Akamai.
Blaze takes traffic flowing from a website and, through content delivery network partners, repackages the information before it reaches the user's device or computer.
"We can take sites that have 160 objects on them and shrink them down to 50 objects, and we make those smaller, and we change the code to make the browser process it more efficiently," Mr. Weider said in a previous interview with OBJ.
Akamai stated it plans to integrate that technology with its cloud-based application, which uses 100,000 servers to monitor the flow of network traffic and to make adjustments as failures and congestion occur.
"As businesses provide rich, interactive web experiences online and across devices, it is vital that end users receive a consistently high-performing site," stated Rick McConnell, executive vice-president of Akamai's products and development.
"The team at Blaze will be an important addition to our focus on site acceleration. Our goal continues to be providing customers with the most comprehensive set of technologies to optimize all aspects of their site performance."
Founded in mid-2010, Blaze has received about $2 million in funding from sources including angel investors and the Business Development Bank of Canada.
The company's target customers were e-commerce sites, who wanted faster conversions to sales; media outlets, where faster sites translated to more pages viewed; and customers seeking a better ranking on Google, which has started to take the speed of pages into account when ranking websites.
According to Mr. Weider, Blaze has 15 customers and has been active for two quarters. As an early stage startup, he noted it was not profitable.
Mr. Weider was previously director of security, cloud and software development automation at IBM's rational software division. He was also the founder and chief technology officer of web application security firm Watchfire, which was bought by IBM in 2007.
Coincidentally, Watchfire has a presence in the Boston area, where Akamai is based.
In a Jan. 24 Bloomberg interview, Akamai chief executive Paul Sagan said the company is seeking acquisitions to grow. Just in December, it bought rival Cotendo Inc. for US$268 million in cash, the second-largest takeover in Akamai's history.
Akamai will deliver its fourth-quarter results later today, at 4:30 p.m. In third-quarter results released in late October, it disclosed GAAP net income of $42.3 million, up six per cent from the year before. Revenue increased by 11 per cent to $281.9 million.
Major customers of Akamai include Adobe, Apple, CBS, MTV Networks, USA Today and Verizon Wireless.
Akamai was founded in 1998 following research at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology by a group led by Tom Leighton, a professor of applied mathematics and founding director of the university's algorithms group.
