AIT vs AKAM Comparison

Applied Industrial Technologies Inc is a distributor of industrial products to the maintenance, repair, and operations market and the original equipment manufacturing industry. Further, the company provides engineering and design services for industrial and fluid power applications. The products include bearings, power transmission components, fluid power components and systems, industrial rubber products, linear motion components, safety products, oilfield supplies, and other industrial and maintenance supplies. The company's reportable segments are; Service Center Based Distribution which derives key revenue, and Engineered Solutions. Geographically, the company derives its key revenue from the United States and the rest from Canada and other countries.

Akamai operates a content delivery network, in which customers store content on distributed servers to deliver it to their own customers more quickly. Akamai has over 350,000 servers distributed over 4,350 points of presence in more than 700 cities globally. This network supports upward of 20% of global internet traffic, generating massive amounts of data. Using data generated by the delivery network, the firm offers cybersecurity products and cloud computing services, ranging from API security to zero-trust enterprise access, which has surpassed the delivery network in revenue and importance. As of 2026, the primary focus has shifted to offering computing hardware as a service, with an emphasis on serving large language model providers such as Anthropic.