CDNs solves the bottlenecks related to performance, security and origin capacity

CDNs or content delivery networks help companies who want to serve digital assets to end users on the Internet. It solves the bottlenecks related to performance, security and origin capacity.

Here, Ersin Galioglu, VP of Strategic Initiatives, Limelight Networks, talks more abour CDNs, and the way ahead. Excerpts:

BW: What are the trends that you are seeing in the CDN-space?

Ersin Galioglu: CDNs help any company who want to serve digital assets to end users on the Internet. It solves the bottlenecks related to performance, security and origin capacity. Meaning, it is a mandatory solution for a seamless delivery of content across the globe on all devices.

But, the CDN space has a lot of players and the solutions have been commoditized in the past few years, which reflects in the pricing of the products.  A multi-CDN strategy is what most of the customers choose to mitigate their risks.

Working with just one provider can impact your brand, as no CDN has complete control over the entire internet (and thankfully so). Currently, the entire industry is worth around US$ 4 billion and it will grow to US$ 7-8 billion by 2020, according to CDN experts. It is a growing industry and every CDN can have a share of the pie.

BW: How do you see CDN progressing in the Indian market? How do you compare this market with markets elsewhere in the world?

Ersin Galioglu: We have seen positive trends in the past few years. India is an emerging market for Content Delivery Network (CDN). Over the last few years, the startup culture has swept the land and entrepreneurs have started giving more importance to the digital experience of their end users.

As the technology continues to evolve and web applications continue to grow, companies face the challenge of scaling their infrastructure to match the exponential rise in their audience numbers, all this with the burning need to shield their digital assets from intruders.

These pain points have made the Indian market open to the CDN technology. Business who value long-term engagements with their end-users and a hassle free digital experience are the early adopters.

BW: What is your dependence on, and relationship with the telcos?

Ersin Galioglu: Data on the Internet is sent over the first mile, the network that connects the origin server full of content to the intermediary networks which consist of the middle mile. Connection between the middle mile and the end user is the last mile. Limelight controls the middle mile completely, but we depend on telcos as the last mile is, for a big part, under their control and that is the only way we can be close to the end user consuming the content.

We have instituted a win-win agreement with telcos: All telcos who peer with us, can deliver their traffic for our customers using our backbone at no cost. We have peering relationships with all major telcos and ISPs in India.

BW: How is your business strategy being shaped by these trends?

Ersin Galioglu: Though Limelight has been founded in 2001 and has been a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: LLNW) since 2007, it is an unknown brand in India compared to some of our brothers from the CDN industry.

For the past five years, we have focused on running the India business as a small start-up, focusing on building a brand, increasing capacity and growing the local team. So far, we have added three points of presence (POPs) in Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi, and increased our capacity 2X since last year.

In 2017, we are working on increasing our capacity even more to 5X and adding more POPs to cater to the new, digital-savvy generation. We are planning to gain more market share in India in our traditional strongholds like OTT, media and software where we can confidently promise at least a 10 percent increase in performance over the competition.

We are also planning to expand in e-commerce, IoT, banking and public sectors, where people can benefit a lot from our content delivery expertise and high quality of delivery. Overall, the focus will continue being the same as in the past: Increase our infrastructure, build a team of genuine CDN enthusiasts, focus on innovation and customer satisfaction, staying competitive in pricing and features.

BW: How do you differentiate your services with the ones like Akamai, Amazon  Web Services, etc.?

Ersin Galioglu: Our Content Delivery Services provide higher performing, cost-effective content delivery, ensuring a better experience for our customers and their end customers. We are different from the traditional CDN vendor because of our dense centralized architecture.

We are one of the largest private networks in the world. We have more than 80+ points of presences at strategical points of the globe, interconnected by our own or leased fiber. Our private fiber optic network is exclusively dedicated to our customers and is not shared with any public Internet traffic.

We control the quality of service upstream and down. When you are using Limelight, you are on a private highway of the internet and we can customize every centimeter of it for a smooth delivery of your traffic.

Moreover, our support model is based on building a lasting relationship with our clients. Our support teams are always local and they closely work with our clients. We have made a conscious decision to grow our India headcount slowly but organically along with our customers.

Finally, our main focus is and has always been innovation. We want to genuinely help companies create an out of the world digital experience for their end customers. And we keep adding features and tweaking our network to make it efficient, secure, reliable and scalable.

BW: How has Limelight Network's technology helped the OTT platforms store tremendous amount of data?

Ersin Galioglu: Many OTTs need to deliver large volumes of digital content with excellent performance to a geographically dispersed user base. By 2020 storage revenues in the Media industry and the OTT space are expected to be 37 percent archiving, 34 percent post-production, 26 percent content distribution and 3 percent content acquisition.

New, denser formats for video and film, combined with conversion of existing media to new formats require new capacity solutions.  Limelight Origin Storage which is one of our flagship products has been successful in media-on-demand environments especially where there is dynamic content and time-sensitive delivery requirements.

What we do is to improve the user experience, responses and quality of delivery intelligently. We have the best storage solution in the industry according to Cedexis reports and very competitive in terms of pricing as well which makes it an obvious partner for OTT customers.

BW: Who are your key customers in India?

Ersin Galioglu: The CDN is a behind the scene solution and not a lot of people know that we are behind big brands when they try to deliver rich media content in India. Though I cannot disclose all the names due to confidentiality agreements, big names in the software delivery (like Systweak, PCVark) and media and broadcast industry (online newspapers like The New Indian Express or OTT pioneers in India (like Cinesoft, Microscan, MultiTV) work with us.

BW: Has there been any impact in the CDN market with the increase of smart phones and smart TVs in India?

Ersin Galioglu: Yes, the more devices, the more eyeballs are ready to consume the content online. The increase of devices and formats and the distribution of the content to huge audiences always contributes to congestion, security and other middle mile issues. This is the area where CDNs thrive. This is our purpose to exist.

Given Limelight’s investment in India in the last few months and our future plans, we are in the right place to help digital India spread its wings and fly to higher peaks.

BW: What is the present-day scenario in content piracy and theft?

Ersin Galioglu: Earlier applications were not profoundly rich in terms of digital assets and experience, thus performance used to carry more weight. The evolution of cellular technology witnessed spectrum of devices flooding the market. This resulted in industries engaging more and getting closer to their end users.

Individuals, at the comfort of their house can watch a movie, shop online and exercise banking transaction and all this in parallel. While the industry has been successful in getting closer to the consumer, they have earned themselves a challenge to protect their assets.

These challenges from multiple industry vectors were embraced by the CDN industry resulting in advanced security solutions covering almost all industry spaces. The security product line is well received by the industry and in today’s world we barely see an application that has not implemented any security measure.

BW: How does Limelight’s Content Delivery Network helps its customers to secure their content and mitigate attacks on websites and web servers?

Ersin Galioglu: Limelight Cloud Security capabilities are integrated with our global content delivery network, and include important functionality to protect digital content from hackers, website volumetric attacks (DDoS), unauthorized access to content, and content theft.

By blocking network and website attacks with globally distributed DDoS AI and WAF protection mechanisms, performance is not sacrificed for security, and our customer websites are available for business. Our entire network is SSL ready, and content is secure during transmission through the network, preventing intellectual property theft.

Features like URL tokenization keeps unauthorized users off copyrighted content. We keep innovating and upgrading our network to protect our customers against the latest threats.