“Going forward, Akamai’s rent-a-server cloud services will be called Linode” would have been a better solution, yeah. So the way you say “Amazon EC2” or “Amazon AWS”, you’d say “Akamai Linode”. The only downside is that inevitably people would shorten that to “Linode” instead of “Akamai”, which hurts brand recognition. And I guess that downside is significant enough to cause them to go with this bland “Akamai’s cloud services” moniker. That’s what commenters here are reacting to more than anything, I think: it’s very “bland corporation”-y to care that much about brand recognition and that little about other things.
Because big corporations buy the exact same things, you just market to them differently. Throw in various kinds of support contracts and "enterprise" whatever and you make much better margins off of the corporate contract even if what you are selling is pretty much identical.
The point is that Akamai is probably correct that all Linode really needs to change to be seen as viable by large corporations is the marketing. Its incredibly dumb that the world works like that even at the scale of large corporations that you would think would care less about being marketed to, but my experience has been the opposite / being tickled by marketing is even more important for big corporations.
It should also be noted that the people who choose infrastructure vendors are rarely the actual sysadmins in charge of the infrastructure. These kinds of decisions are standardized across large organizations (sysadmins would never be able to agree on something like that let's be honest) and the choices tend to be made by people who haven't set up a new server in a decade, (if they've ever done so then they are more technical than most in charge of IT purchasing).
Existing customers of what? Akamai didn't buy a business (or if they did, they don't care that they did.) Akamai already has a business, one with (very profitable) customers. Rather, in buying Linode, Akamai bought another supply chain to use to feed their existing business-model with.
Think like: a sporting goods company buying a tire company, not to make tires, but because they want to sell their existing customers rubber balls to go with their knee pads and stickball sticks; and the tire company happens to have a good rubber-goods supply chain that can be repurposed to do that.
Akamai doesn't want to get into the VPS business. They want to repurpose Linode's systems to extend their "cloud-services integrated solution provider" solution portfolio. Remember "IBM SoftLayer"? Akamai wants to be IBM, and so they need a SoftLayer of their own.
