Latest List Of Vendors In The Content Delivery Ecosystem

Dan Rayburn | Wednesday July 30, 2014 | 01:52 PM | Comments (12)

It’s been eight months since I last updated my list of vendors in the CDN ecosystem and since then, some changes have taken place. Below is my most up to date list, with many new companies like Aryaka, Comcast, Hibernia Networks, MileWEB, MaxCDN and others having been added. (You can easily find this list at anytime by going to www.cdnlist.com)

The term CDN means many things to different people and today, is an umbrella term that covers a lot of different types of content delivery services. Video streaming, software downloads, web and mobile content acceleration, licensed/managed CDN, transparent caching, FEO, and services to measure CDN performance, load balancing and analytics and cloud intelligence. It’s a complex ecosystem with a lot of vendors both large and small. You also have some CDNs that cross over into other industries like security and WAN optimization, two segments that for the most part, are not included in my list.

This list only includes commercial services in the market and does not include companies who have their own CDNs, like Netflix, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitch, Facebook etc. If you think your company should be added to any of these lists, see the bottom of the post for instructions.

Vendors In The CDN Ecosystem

We hear a lot about telcos and carriers in the CDN market, but the vast majority of them have built out CDNs for their own internal use and are not selling it as a commercial CDN service. So it’s not accurate to say that they all compete with traditional service based CDNs. There are a few exceptions like Level 3, Verizon (EdgeCast), Comcast and Tata who offer commercial CDN services and compete against other commercial CDNs, but most telco and carrier based commercial CDN services are based off of reselling a traditional CDN, for example AT&T reselling Akamai. This telco/carrier list is far from being complete and many more still need to be added.

Telco/Carrier Based CDN Deployments

In addition to the current crop of vendors in the market, I think it’s important to remember how the CDN industry got to where it is today. Many CDNs raised tons of money but didn’t have a business model, some only focused on selling at the lowest price and many had technology that simply didn’t work. Lots on CDNs went under, some within a short time of launching. The CDN market has been through a lot of hard times over the past 19 years and here’s a running list of those who got acquired or went under.

CDN Related Vendor Acquisitions/Closures

Each time I make a list of vendors, for any solution or service in the market, I always get emails from companies asking why they are not on the list. If you think you should be added to the list, please add it to the comments section but note that I am not listing regional hosting providers or companies who get most of their sales from $100 a month customers. Also, just because you are not on this list doesn’t mean you don’t have a valid solution in the market, but the companies listed are the ones I get asked about most often, get mentioned in the media, are included in major RFPs and promote and market their services to medium and large customers.

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