Caching, CDNs morph into managed delivery

During the past year or so we’ve talked about changes in the caching and content delivery market. The basic technology most caching vendors have is valuable and important – it’s just that plain old caching is no longer enough.

Michael Hoch, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group, recently released an interesting report that talks about what has been happening in the caching market and where future opportunities lie. While the fallout in the caching market has been bad for suppliers, buyers should be happy. Network managers should see pricing on commodity products such as caching fall, while the number of features and functions layered on top of basic caching rise, the report says.

Network managers interviewed by Aberdeen said they are looking for features within caches such as URL filtering and security. In addition, the network managers say they want to be able to see how and where content is delivered and how it affects their network.

Managed delivery products address those issues, Hoch says. “Managed delivery solutions are products, appliances and services that enable the efficient, guaranteed, and monitored movement of digital data, content and applications across IP networks,” he writes.

While caching may be part of a managed delivery product, some managed delivery suppliers don’t even use a caching component, Hoch says. So, buyers should no longer focus on caching but rather think in terms of managed delivery.

“The intelligence and efficiencies gained with managed delivery solutions can be significant in terms of cost containment, speed, user intelligence, application prioritization, and so on,” Hoch says.