Web acceleration services provider Akamai announced a couple of significant hires this week: the company appointed Kumud Kalia as its chief information officer, and Rick McConnell as Executive Vice President of Products and Development. Both of them will report directly to company CEO and president Paul Sagan.

Kalia joins Akamai from Direct Energy, where he served a similar role as the head of its Information Services organization.

“Kumud brings great passion and experience to the role of CIO, and we are fortunate to add him to our management team. As an innovative and strategic business leader, Kumud’s expertise includes managing high performing IT and operations teams for companies experiencing rapid growth and requiring significant scale across multiple business units.”

Kalia received several awards, including a ranking in Computerworld’s 2008 ‘Best in Class’ IT leaders list.

McConnel also has a lot of experience under his belt, having served at various executive-level positions for Cisco, including VP of the networking firm’s Unified Communications business and strategy and operations lead for its 5 billion Communications and Collaboration business.  He holds an MBA from Stanford.

New leadership could be a refreshing change for Akamai, as their stock took a hit earlier this year when it said it’s struggling to keep up with competition, but the company did manage to pass a few milestones since.  That included a partnership with Apple to keep its Mac App Store up and running while the masses flocked to download Mac OS X.

One of the firm’s biggest focuses is the online gaming industry.  The world of massive-multiplayer games continues to scale as the number of connected devices capable of running them grows, and there’s a security aspect to top it all off.  Our own Kit Dotson wrote about Akamai’s angle on this industry here.