Just as CDN services have become ho hum, up pops Cotendo--an Israeli startup with the potential to shake up the CDN market. Although Cotendo describes itself as a CDN, don't be fooled. Its real raison d'être is something more powerful and innovative--application delivery management. It has what it calls a CDN Balancer, which allows you to serve content when you want and where you want across multiple CDNs. Why is that powerful? Because it gives you unprecedented control over how content gets delivered. Here are just a few of the possible ways it can be useful.
1) You can automatically get content to regional audiences using the CDN provider with the best service in a particular region. Let's say you are particularly concerned about giving your audiences in the US and China a good content experience. Cotendo's service can be configured to have Akamai deliver content within the US and ChinaCache deliver content within China.
2) It allows you to find the most cost effective/best CDN solution for a particular time of the day, month, or year. For example, you may want to serve content from a pricey, high capacity CDN when content demand is high, but you can get away with serving content from a less expensive CDN--or maybe even the origin server--at off peak times. Cotendo's service can automatically route requests to the services of your choice when you want.
3) You can encourage CDN service providers to compete for your business. Think about it. Cotendo gives you leverage because it enables you to choose which CDN to use and when. If you can easily deliver content from a menu of CDN providers and one gives you a better deal, you can send more content to that CDN and save yourself some money. That's a good outcome, especially during tough economic times.
We predict that hosting service providers and carriers that want to expand their value to content providers will find Cotendo's offering very appealing. We wouldn't be surprised to see some white label arrangements, assuming that Cotendo can prove its service works as advertised.
Cotendo tells us that they offer more tracking and reporting capabilities than anyone else. Advanced content management reporting will become increasingly valuable to hosting providers as well as carriers as they look to strengthen customer relationships. We are witnessing the dawn of application delivery management. Application delivery services exist and more will come with unique capabilities and features. Being able to manage them all with one platform--that is itself a service--makes a lot of sense. So if Cotendo delivers on this promise it can make itself attractive to hosters and carriers. The key value Cotendo will have to deliver is true real-time control and comprehensive reporting so you can tell which CDN or other services in the cloud really delivered a better user experience.
Kudos to Cotendo for cooking up an innovative way to enter the CDN game. When it comes to scale and efficiency the big established CDNs raise formidable barriers to entry for newcomers. Cotendo, which poached its VP of Marketing and other staffers from Limelight Networks, knows this well. But Cotendo can change the game to meet the need for content owners to fully understand and control the delivery of their content around world at any given time.
Keep an eye on this upstart.
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Sounds just like Conviva
Sounds just like Conviva
Sounds just like Conviva
Sounds just like Conviva
Just somewhat active "policy" for Traffic Management
Global traffic management systems like those offered by Akamai, Level3, and others, actually do the "heavy lifting" to enable something like you've described. All Cotendo does is the equivalent of automatically changing your Traffic Management policies. Anyone could implement this themselves by (a) learning to use the web services interface to an existing xTM product and (b) writing a cron job to push out changes on a schedule.
Don't get me wrong, there's a little "cleverness" in this, but large consumers of CDN services already do this themselves. Automating it for everyone to use is a nice niche, but this isn't a new CDN, it's not something brand new in the world, and it's not going to "change the game".
This is More Than Traffic Management
It is true that much of what Cotendo does you can also do as a subscriber to one of the big CDN services. They let you control how much traffic you push through their service. And if you use 3 CDN services then you can manage this using 3 separate management interfaces. Of course each service runs things differently and the feedback loops of when things change are different. Pretty soon this is getting complicated. Certainly too complicated for any real sophisticated real time management of your CDNs.
Furthermore there are two completely different management objectives that need to be supported. The first content management - which content will I send to a CDN. Each CDN makes it easy to send more their way. The second is CDN management - which CDN will get the content. Here the CDNs are not very motivated to help since they expect you are only using their service. Now you are forced to really do this yourself.
Big web and content sites will write the necessary management software since what we are describing is well past a cron job. But small and medium online businesses just don't get to do this unless they use Cotendo.
The game change appears once true control of CDNs is in the hands of many CDN customers. This is like unlocked cell phones. Or to go back to cron, it is like giving the hosted application user a PC to do some stuff locally. It sucked business applications and data right out of the data center.
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