Global Crossing Reselling CDN Services From Limelight And EdgeCast

Folks have been speculating today that Global Crossing might soon enter the CDN space by reselling one of the current CDNs in the market. I can confirm that Global Crossing has already been working with Limelight Networks and started reselling their CDN offering over the past few weeks and plans to focus primarily on the European market. Folks inside the industry have been talking about this for awhile now, but the companies involved have been pretty quiet and not commented on the story.

Unique to the deal is that Global Crossing is also providing first level support for customers and is hooked into Limelight's network so that Global Crossing can do self-provisioning and real-time monitoring of the network. For Global Crossing, they get more than just a reseller type agreement and can take full control and responsibility for the customer. For Limelight, it allows them to try and penetrate the enterprise market which is Global Crossing's strength and a vertical that Limelight has been targeting in the hopes of diversifying their revenue across more than just media and entertainment customers.

In addition to Limelight, Global Crossing is also already selling EdgeCast's CDN services as well but I don't know the specifics around the support and provisioning on the EdgeCast network. Although based on what I know of EdgeCast's software, which is fully designed for resllers to completely manage customers on their own, I expect the deal to be similar to Limelight's, although the company would not comment.

While I expect we'll hear more details about this from Global Crossing at some time, what I'd really like to know is what metrics they plan to use to decide when to sell one CDN over another? Why would they tell one company to use EdgeCast over Limelight or vice versa? Is it simply based on price? Location of servers? I'd also like to know if Global Crossing has any sort of internal system setup where they can pass traffic from one CDN to the other without the customer knowing and basically load balance between the two.

David Vorhaus from Yankee Group Research put out a report this morning on the EdgeCast and Global Crossing deal but the report is not public for me to link to.