Speedera: Economy picking up

Tech spending is slowly picking up, and that’s good news for the content delivery market – at least, that’s the message I got from Speedera, which announced its year-end results last week.

According to Speedera – which is a private company, so we have to take its word for it – revenue for the year doubled compared to what they were in 2001. In addition, the company says it was cash-flow-positive in its fourth quarter, which ended June 30, and that sales jumped 12% during that month, compared to sales logged in May.

Speedera President and CEO Ajit Gupta says Speedera’s fiscal results are an indication that things are starting to pick up in the tech sector. And that’s good news for all the players in the CDN and Web acceleration markets.

In fact, Gupta says that traffic on the Speedera network more than tripled during fiscal 2003.

It’s true that Speedera has built out its client roster in the last few months, with companies such as American Eagle Outfitters, Fox Broadcasting and NASA using its services. Looking ahead, Gupta notes that the introduction of services that go beyond traditional static content delivery – such as security, site monitoring, Web analytics and edge processing – will help spur the CDN market.

I’ve talked about that in previous newsletters, and business users should be watching for more advanced services from CDNs down the road.

Speaking of an evolving market, this newsletter is going through an evolution of its own. This will be my last newsletter. My colleague Denise Dubie will be handling newsletter duties from here on out. I’ve covered a range of topics in this newsletter and Denise would like to take things even further. Please let her know what areas are of greatest interest to you as Web acceleration evolves into more all-encompassing network optimization. E-mail her at mailto:ddubie@nww.com