Akamai Technologies Monday named its chief scientist and co-founder, Dr. Tom Leighton, to succeed Paul Sagan as CEO effective Jan. 1.

Sagan said back in April he would leave Akamai by the end of 2013. He became president of the company in 1999 and CEO in 2005. Akamai's sales more than quadrupled during his run, and the company said Monday that Sagan will remain on the board of directors and become a senior adviser to the company.

Leighton co-founded Akamai, which specializes in content delivery networking, in 1998. He has been a member of Akamai's executive team since then, mostly as chief scientist. Before Akamai, he was a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Akamai is extremely fortunate to have such an outstanding executive with Tom's business and technology experience to lead Akamai's next phase of growth," Sagan said in a statement. "He is an innovator with a deep understanding of the shifting landscape in public and private clouds, distributed computing platforms and Internet security. Tom has earned the trust and respect of our customers, partners, employees and shareholders through his hard work and vision over the past 14 years."

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Akamai confirmed additional executive moves Monday. Robert Hughes will become president, worldwide operations, and Rick McConnell will become president, products and development. Both are currently executive vice presidents, respectively in charge of global sales and services and Akamai's products. Hughes has been at Akamai since 2003, McConnell joined from Cisco in 2011.

Akamai in the past year has made a number of acquisitions, including IP platform provider Verivue; content acceleration startup FastSoft; Web page optimization specialist Blaze Software; and cloud and mobile acceleration services company Cotendo.

Akamai is scheduled to discuss its future priorities at an investor summit scheduled for March 11 in Boston.

PUBLISHED DEC. 17, 2012