Media everywhere

A number of trends are driving this resurgence, but perhaps the most striking is the tremendous growth of broadband and the explosion in the use of rich media, not simply by media companies and distributors, but by mainstream corporate and government Web sites and millions of YouTube, MySpace, and other Web 2.0 users. Audio and video are particularly latency sensitive, so they benefit greatly from the reach, caching, and latency slashing techniques offered by CDNs.

For example, when the Anda-Burghardt advertising agency was hired to create a Web site that would bring more tourist dollars to the village of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., art director Jeff Conway immediately thought of streaming video -- lots of it. "We use video streams to target Carmel's celebrity history and pet friendliness." Thanks to acceleration from VitalStream's CDN, what was once a dry, static government Web site is now an extravaganza of smoothly running video streams highlighting performing arts, "girlfriends' getaways," and Carmel's artists' colony. "Everyone is amazed at how quickly it all downloads and how good it looks," Conway says.

In a more serious vein, the American Society of Biomechanical and Molecular Biologists uses NaviSite's CDN to accelerate its live conference broadcasts, continuing-education streams, academic updates, and other downloads.

"Rich media has become mainstream," says Willie Tejada, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Netli. "You'll find Flash and other rich media right off the home pages of companies like SAP and Nokia, who also use it for everything from quarterly training to virtual communications from the CEOs. All these things are helped by CDN technology." Companies have even embraced Web 2.0 rich media, as evidenced by Anheuser-Busch's Bud.tv and by Cadillac.com, both of which solicit "consumer-generated content" in the style of YouTube. And CDNs have adjusted their services to speed uploads in response.

Another important trend is the ongoing consumerization of IT. "A lot of departments are using YouTube to host legitimate training videos," says Robert Whitely, senior analyst, enterprise networking, at Forrester Research.

"IBM owns 20-some-odd islands in Second Life," which is also second home to Circuit City, Sears, Toyota, Dell, and Adidas, among others. In fact, Cisco launched a recent integrated services router on Second Life. "It's a very inexpensive form of viral marketing," Whitely says.

Although rich media and Web 2.0 are sexy -- and are the main focus of such CDN providers as Limelight Networks -- they are not the only CDN drivers. Software downloads and updates are another big trend that depends to a large extent on CDN's reach and scalability for handling peak loads reliably. According to Netli's Tejada, "It's an alternative to building out infrastructure for folks like McAfee, Trend Micro, and Symantec, who have to get updates out to a broad base of users in an explosive fashion when a virus hits." Video downloads and podcasts have also become prevalent in many mainstream companies.

The Air Force Air Combat Command Geospatial Information Office relies on Akamai to add reliability, availability, and speed to its huge satellite imaging and mapping downloads, ranging in size from 1GB to about 25GB each. "The download failure rate on our own servers was in the neighborhood of 10 percent," says Dave Williams, technical analyst, "but using Akamai's CDN, it's less than 0.1 percent and takes 25 minutes to download a 1GB file, as opposed to 2 hours."

Two more drivers, particularly for application delivery networks, are the Webification of corporate applications and business processes combined with outsourcing, offshoring, telecommuting, employee mobility, and datacenter consolidation, all of which increasingly move users farther and farther from their applications and data.

Millipore, a provider of tools and services for university, biotech, and pharmaceutical-company laboratories, would not have been able to get its b-to-b e-commerce application running in Japan without the help of Netli. "We wanted our Japanese distributors to transition from the hundreds of faxes they used for transactions to our e-commerce platform," says Jeffrey O'Halloran, Millipore's director of e-business, "but when we ran a demonstration, it took them longer to go through the checkout process online than it did to send us a fax."

After contracting with Netli's NetLightning service, Millipore saw page load times for the various parts of its application fall from more than 7 seconds to 1 second. Soon more than half of its Japanese distributors were on board.

Airline applications are obvious candidates for application acceleration, as are offshore call centers, financial services portals, SaaS (software as a service) providers, and point-of-sale systems connected to back-end ERP applications. Akamai and Mirror Image are even allowing customers to offload certain middleware application logic such as servlets and Java Server Pages completely from their companies' origin servers to the CDN.