Who will take the place of EMC as the biggest independent tech company in the Boston area? Akamai Technologies, led by chief executive Tom Leighton, could make a run at it, following Dell’s recent acquisition of EMC. Akamai just signed a 15-year lease for a new 486,000-square-foot headquarters to be built near its existing corporate office in Cambridge’s Kendall Square, and it’s agreed to lease an additional 150,000 square feet in Kendall Square. Leighton recently spoke with Globe reporter Jon Chesto.

1Leighton was a math professor at MIT for more than 15 years before joining forces with one of his graduate students in 1998 to launch Akamai, now known for its technology that manages the flow of data across the Internet.

“It’s very, very different from being a professor. [But] there are useful similarities. Being able to communicate and to explain what we’re doing as a company and the grand challenges that we’re going after, which are technical in nature, it helps to have a [teaching] background.’’

2Leighton, 60, has been a fixture in and around MIT for decades. He originally came to Kendall Square to pursue a PhD in applied mathematics in 1978, so he remembers when the area was scruffier and dining options were limited.

“There’s been tremendous development here: all sorts of clean-tech companies . . . [and] incubators. There are good restaurants, hotels, all the [new] businesses. The change has been good, except for traffic.’’

3Akamai employs more than 1,660 people in Cambridge. When it came time to look for a bigger space that would allow it to consolidate operations that now are spread among six buildings, the company didn’t just look around the neighborhood. But in the end, Leighton said, it didn’t make sense to leave Kendall Square, despite the high rent.

“We looked at Boston. We looked farther out in the suburbs. And we looked at where our employees were and how they commute and where they wanted to be. We looked at where the talent for recruiting lives and decided that . . . we really liked the area we’re in right now.’’

4Leighton understands both sides of last year’s debate on Beacon Hill about whether the state should limit companies’ use of noncompete agreements. The issue was portrayed as a battle between established tech companies that favor them, and the startups and venture capitalists who believe they should be abolished. Leighton stressed the importance of noncompetes but said they rarely need to be enforced at Akamai.

“If you’re a big, established company doing a lot of innovative stuff, you tend to like them. You don’t want employees walking out the door and taking the stuff to your competitor. . . . [But] one of the things we really like about the Boston area is that employees do stay. It’s more part of the culture to stay with a company for years and years. That doesn’t happen in California as much.’’

5Leighton sounds modest when he discusses Akamai’s role in the region’s tech sector. It’s already one of the biggest publicly traded independent tech companies in Greater Boston. And unlike EMC, Akamai isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

“Our expectations are to stay independent and to be headquartered here. It’s a great talent base here right next to MIT, in our case, but also near all the universities in the area. We have a lot of internships with the universities, a lot of recruiting. . . . It’s a great place to be, a really good ecosystem.’’

Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jonchesto.