Mirror Image Puts Resellers in CDN Business

Posted: 11/2003

Mirror Image Puts Resellers in CDN Business
By Khali Henderson

Mirror Image Internet in September rolled out its Content Access Point (CAP) Partner Program, which enables partners, such as telecom service providers, to create and operate a private-label content delivery network (CDN) in as few as 30 days.

Mirror Images CAP platform provides the foundation for a worldwide Application Delivery Network, which effectively collects, stores and delivers Web content and applications to millions of global users by circumventing Internet congestion.

Mirror Images Private-Label CAP Partner Program gives service providers the opportunity to use world-class, patented technology to expand service offerings while keeping the focus on whats most important to the bottom line  core competencies, said Greg Howard, an analyst at the HTRC Group LLC. This program is the ideal solution for companies who are looking to invest time and money in product and brand development, rather than creating and operating a global network.

There are several possible arrangements under the program, but the primary offer is capacity reservation on the Mirror Image network for a partner to sell to its customers.

Its a little bit of a twist on the theme, says Bob Hammond, Mirror Image CTO, explaining that under the companys previous resale program, Global Alliance Partner (GAP) Program, partners would sell the CDN on a customer-by-customer basis. Here they are actually almost renting capacity which they can turn around and resell to their customers as they see fit.

Hammond explains that resellers can deliver content to their customers from within their own networks, but use Mirror Images facilities to help distribute the load, or they can combine their private-label CAPs with the bigger network of Mirror Images CAPs.

As another option, Mirror Image can deploy and run CAPs within a customers network at their colocation facilities.

Hammond explains Mirror Image can offer these options because its architecture is based primarily on a small number of large nodes (CAPs) as opposed to tens of thousands of edge servers. Currently, Mirror Image runs 19 CAPs, which provide global content delivery.

In addition to carrier, the company is targeting colocation and Internet peering point providers as potential partners for the white-label offer.

Hammond says the offer is timely because each of these targets is getting its house in order and now looking once again at value-added services to add revenue.

As providers, they have to get out of the mode of selling basic services like physical colo and transit, he says. They have to be able to look at content delivery or CDN as an additive service that they could sell.

For example, instead of selling a client 30mbps transit, they should sell 10mpbs of local loop and long distance and then 20mbps of content delivery services and blend them together. Together you get local coverage and distance coverage for things you want to serve from your content site and then you get global distributed coverage for the graphical elements of your site, he explains.

Ideal customers for such a blended solution would be end users such as media and advertising server companies, e-stores and software companies offering downloads for licenses and patches.

Content delivery services are one of the key forces shaping the next-generation Internet and corporate Intranets, says Henry Goldberg, a senior analyst with In-Stat/MDR. They improve the speed of Web site delivery, provide high-quality video/audio streaming, rapidly download files, and are beginning to extend into distributed computing of Web-based applications.

In a report published in September, the research firm estimates U.S. content delivery services revenue will grow about 20 percent in 2003 from the estimated level of $186 million in 2002. That growth, In-Stat/MDR reports will come from both existing customers expanding their use of content delivery services and from new customers subscribing to these services.

Converting in-house CDN users to outsourced content delivery services should be a key goal of content delivery service providers, because this would greatly increase the market for these services, says Goldberg.

Recently, In-Stat/MDR conducted a survey of 485 end-user organizations on the adoption of content delivery services or in-house CDNs. About 23 percent currently use a content delivery network (either by itself or as a hybrid solution with an inhouse CDN), but almost twice as many currently use an in-house CDN.