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Hosting industry shifts focus to content delivery
Although the economy, especially the high-tech sector, continues to endure hard times, complex hosting operations continue to boom.
This fact is evident because while corporate giants such as Nortel Networks slash spending and workforces, Web hosting companies such as Superb Internet, Exodus and Akamai continue to sign up new clients.
The boon in new sign-ups revolve around content delivery. The new partnership between AT&T and Excite@Home precipitated this rapid succession of deals. The two broadband giants teamed up to leverage their respective network and audience capacity in order to offer their corporate clients greater avenues of content distribution.
The companies with smaller infrastructure and market capitalization then followed with their own content distribution sign-ups. Akamai entered the fray by signing up ITworld.com, a premier Web resource for enterprise IT professionals, for its live webcast management.
Itworld.com will use "Akamai Forum," an interactive webcasting system to provide end-to-end functionality to cost-effectively create and manage ITworld.com's live webcasts, and their subsequent delivery on-demand, to enhance the quality and reliable of those programs.
"Our audience is comprised of IT professionals with high-speed Internet connections and a continual thirst for knowledge about the industry," says Rich Mikita, a senior vice president at ITworld.com. "Akamai Forum will allow us to meet our growing audience demand for editorial and vendor webcasts by improving the availability and reliability of our broadband programming."
The news site for IT professionals selected the service from Akamai because it is a complete event management system that offers them studio-quality and highly flexible production capabilities for streaming webcasts, while enabling content providers to reduce infrastructure costs by outsourcing to Akamai.
The service accommodates a broad range of signal acquisition and production options, and includes functionality as one-to-many interactivity in the form of viewer question submission, viewer polls and surveys. Other audience management features include standard or customizable registration, automated e-mail confirmation and reminders, detailed attendance reporting, real-time
audience profiling, and live and on-demand viewing capabilities.
In addition to Akamai Forum, ITworld.com also uses the "Akamai FreeFlow" content delivery service, which improves Web site speed, performance, and reliability by delivering rich Web content from Akamai's globally distributed network. Though terms and worth of the deal was not disclosed, we can be assured that the deal will catalyze competition and cause other complex hosting firms to develop stronger content delivery infrastructure.
Exodus made strides this week to reinforce its own position in the content delivery market segment by teaming with Volera to provide Web content management and acceleration services.
Under an exclusive reseller agreement, Exodus will offer Volera's "Content Exchange" product, a fully managed server-side acceleration service, to customers throughout its worldwide network of Internet data centers. Exodus' alliance with Volera will be designed to strategically compliment Exodus' three-tier content distribution model.
Designed as a complete solution, Exodus' content distribution and caching services are based on a three-tiered architecture that provides caching at multiple levels within the Exodus network: the server, the network itself, and its edge. Tier I, which includes the content exchange service, powered by Volera, will provide server-side acceleration and scalability.
"Exodus is keenly aware that content performance is the foundation for the success of any and every business initiative, whether it targets online shoppers or partners fulfilling orders," says Ellen Hancock, chairman and chief executive officer of Exodus. "Exodus is committed to providing its customers the highest degree of content performance, and is pleased to include Volera as part of our content distribution services."
Volera's "Content Exchange" strategically expands on Exodus' server-side acceleration layer of its content distribution services. Powered by Volera, the server-side accelerator gives customers the power to provide faster content and a richer interactive experience to a greater number of users without additional hardware expense.
The two companies have begun deployment and will continue to roll out the service across Exodus' global network of Internet data centers over the next few months. Volera and Exodus will co-market the service that includes a simple start up with no changes to customer hardware or Web sites. The fully managed solution will be billed based on monthly usage and will include 24
hour monitoring, site reporting and logs, call center support, and level of service pursuant to a service level warranty.
"Exodus and Volera will offer its customers the ability to maximize the performance of their sites by accelerating and intelligently managing content delivery - an increasing challenge for businesses trying to leverage the Internet as a business tool." says Simon Khalaf, president of Volera.
"Exodus has great presence and global reach, and together we can now offer the proven performance and scalability of Volera's Content Exchange to more than four thousand Exodus customers worldwide."
Following suit, Superb Internet also elected to strengthen its service roster this week by partnering with SolidSpeed Networks to offer site acceleration to all its dedicated, collocated and high traffic customers at no additional cost.
"Providing industry-leading, innovative, value added services such as our site acceleration service to our customers allows Superb to differentiate itself from the competition," says Curtis R. Curtis, Director of Marketing, Superb Internet Corp.
"Speed, performance and reliability are critical factors for successfully meeting the hosting services needs of online businesses today and SolidSpeed's technology will provide us an option for enhancing our offerings to our clientele."
Organizations and businesses operating a mission-critical Web site or download service will benefit from Superb Internet's new site acceleration service because their content is pushed closer to the "edge," or nearer to the end user.
"Our agreement with SolidSpeed Networks, will allow our customers to provide faster service and have their content served from multiple locations, while only having to maintain a single copy of the site with us," says Haralds Jass, Superb Internet President and CEO.
"As an industry leader in delivering the latest technological improvements to our customers, SolidSpeed's new technologies provide us with a unique opportunity to bring affordable site acceleration services to the millions of currently underserved small and medium sized businesses. Every business needs a fast, reliable Web site, and now Superb will be able to deliver even
better web hosting solutions to its clients."
The need for speed is critical in light of recent analyst findings. Zona Research reported that $4.6 billion per year is lost due to users abandoning slow Web sites. The Boston Group
stated that 48 per cent of Web visitors would leave prematurely because a site is running too slow.
For this reason, Superb, not unlike its competition, has solidified its content delivery system to ensure speed and efficiency. As businesses get more serious about the efficiency of Web hosting to rationalize their business functions during an economic slowdown, watch for many to get serious about content delivery for delivery on internal and external content.
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