Look out Akamai and Limelight Networks: CDNetworks has set its sights on the U.S. market.

The content delivery network (CDN) provider got started in 2000 in Seoul, Korea, and initially focused its business in the Asia-Pacific region, establishing offices in China and Japan. Then in late 2007, CDNetworks began its push into America. Now the company -- which bills itself as the third-largest global CDN -- is sharing numbers related to its progress after one full year of operation in the U.S.

“We started our U.S. office back in 2007, and that was mainly due to a large rise in the gaming vertical out of Asia-Pacific at that time. Since then we’ve expanded quite rapidly,” says John Kang, vice president of business development.

That expansion in the U.S. includes a five-fold increase in both employees (from eight to 40 employees) and customers.

“We started out with about 20 customers and have grown that to more than 120 [U.S. customers]. Our revenues have also grown roughly 300% during the same time,” Kang says. “2008 was our build-up year. In 2009, I think we’re placed to aggressively compete with the other top CDNs, specifically the likes of Akamai.”

The company plans to grow its U.S. staff by an additional 50% in 2009.

Also in 2008 CDNetworks extended its network infrastructure, adding POPs in Australia and Brazil. “We now have 67 global nodes on five continents,” Kang says. “Each of our POPs is fully capable of doing the core CDN features and services, like streaming, download and caching. We believe in having the core feature set within every node, but at the same time having a global network.”

In today’s rough economy, use of content delivery networks is appealing to some enterprises looking to trim capital expenditures, Kang says. “Enterprise customers are starting to go toward the CDNs more because as their financials are being more scrutinized, they are looking to outsource, rather than completely build those types of networks in house.”

One key draw for enterprise customers is the reliability of CDNetworks’ infrastructure, he adds. “In our nine-year history, we haven’t had a single network outage. That speaks a lot to how we manage our network and have our global load balancing technology in place. That’s first and foremost for enterprise customers.”

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.