Services offer path to in-house CDNs

First Horizon Home Loans is growing fast, making it difficult to keep employees connected as remote offices pop up across the country.

As a result, the Irving, Texas, company is looking to deliver multimedia presentations such as executive briefings and online training to employees via an enterprise content-delivery network (ECDN). The company says this will increase performance and reduce bandwidth demands as rich media is moved across its private WAN.

But First Horizon isn't looking at deploying caches and setting up the ECDN itself. Instead, the company is considering its longtime voice and data provider, MCI.

In July, MCI became the latest service provider to offer a managed enterprise content-delivery service. Called the Managed ECDS, the offering uses Fantastic's ECDN software on IBM Intel-based servers to create a distributed network for corporate content. MCI's Managed ECDS includes security, load-balancing and caching-using equipment that is placed on customer premises.

What sets this service apart from others is that customers need only provide content, and MCI does the rest: designing, deploying, managing and maintaining the infrastructure needed to deliver that content. Customers have access to a Web-based portal to keep tabs on how the content is performing and how users are accessing the content.

Last year, Sprint introduced its ECDN service, partnering with Cisco to help customers design and deploy ECDNs. But analysts say that offering didn't include the type of managed services MCI is delivering.

The introduction of this MCI service, as well as an end-to-end managed offering from Equant, which introduced an appliance-based managed ECDN service in July, signals the move of managed ECDNs into the mainstream, analysts say. Earlier this year, Infonet also introduced a managed security service that uses security gateway appliances that incorporate caching from partner Blue Coat Systems.

Click to see: Managed cache

"The availability of these services means greater choices for enterprises," says Lawrence Orans, a senior analyst at Gartner. "Before, ECDNs were strictly a 'roll your own' proposition. Now enterprises have the option of managed services."

The trend began in the last year or so as companies began looking at in-house CDNs as a means of increasing the performance of online applications and speeding the delivery of multimedia presentations, while reducing bandwidth demands.

While CDNs such as those from Akamai Technologies and Speedera Networks provide an easy way to speed the delivery of content across the Internet, in-house CDNs can be complex, expensive and difficult to deploy and maintain. Gartner says the need for a large, up-front capital expenditure has posed the biggest obstacle. According to Gartner, the cost of each branch office cache can range from $5,000 to $7,000 with support for streaming media adding $3,000 to $8,000 in licensing fees per cache.

But with services such as those from MCI and Equant, users avoid the one-time capital cost and instead pay monthly. Moreover, analysts note, the users get the expertise of the service provider to manage the technology and integrate it with the company's existing network infrastructure.