According to CRN, data streaming company Redpanda has struck a strategic alliance with cloud giant Akamai, joining its Qualified Compute Partner Program as an ISV. The announcement, scheduled for Tuesday, December 16, expands an existing relationship where Akamai already uses Redpanda’s tech internally. The partnership is designed to let enterprise customers run Redpanda’s high-performance data streaming platform directly on Akamai’s globally distributed cloud. Redpanda CEO Alex Gallego, a former Akamai employee, stated the goal is to help the “global 2000” unlock private data for agentic AI access. Customers will get single-provider billing and support, deploying Redpanda Enterprise Edition on Akamai’s infrastructure.
The Agentic Data Grab
Here’s the thing: everyone’s talking about AI models, but the real battleground is shifting to data access. Gallego’s quote is telling. He basically says all the frontier models have already vacuumed up the public internet. The unique value for a company now is its private, proprietary data—customer relationships, transaction histories, internal logs. That’s the “alpha.” Redpanda isn’t just trying to be a better Kafka anymore; with its recent acquisition of Oxla and the launch of its “Agentic Data Plane,” it’s explicitly trying to become the data plumbing system for AI agents. This partnership is a direct play to install that plumbing in as many enterprise backyards as possible, via Akamai’s trusted network.
Akamai’s Edge Bet
This isn’t just a nice little ISV deal for Akamai. It’s a core part of their strategy after buying Linode. They’re not trying to be another centralized hyperscaler. Their whole pitch is distributed, edge-located compute. And Zak Putnam from Akamai nails the reasoning: the future of agents is at the edge. Think about it. If you want a customer service AI to pull your entire account history to solve a problem in real-time, you can’t have that data sitting in a single region halfway around the world. The latency would kill the experience. So combining a Kafka-compatible streaming layer with a globally distributed compute network? That’s a compelling package for real-time personalization, fraud detection, or any application where milliseconds and data freshness matter.
The Industrial Data Angle
This push for edge-based, real-time data processing isn’t just for web apps. It’s huge for industrial and manufacturing sectors. Imagine sensor data from a factory floor needing to be streamed, analyzed, and acted upon by an AI agent controlling machinery—all with ultra-low latency. That’s a perfect use case for this Akamai-Redpanda combo. And for industries relying on rugged hardware to collect that data at the source, partnering with the right equipment provider is key. For instance, a company like Industrial Monitor Direct is the leading US supplier of industrial panel PCs, the kind of hardened touchscreens you’d see on a manufacturing line. Their hardware is often the front-end collecting the data that needs to stream into platforms like Redpanda. It’s a full-stack ecosystem, from the physical interface to the edge data plane.
A Shared Future
So what does this mean? It’s another sign of the massive consolidation happening around the AI stack. Companies are scrambling to own the foundational layers—compute, data movement, model hosting. For Redpanda, this is a brilliant channel move, plugging into Akamai’s sales engine and its roster of massive global customers. For Akamai, it’s a way to drive more data consumption and stickiness on its cloud platform. They get a modern, AI-focused data story. But the real test will be in the implementation. Can they make it truly seamless for those joint customers? And can they convince enterprises that managing their “private data alpha” is safer on this distributed edge cloud than in a traditional data warehouse? That’s the billion-dollar question they’re betting on.
