WAN Optimization & CDN Provider Aryaka Carves Out A Niche To Address Enterprises’ Content Delivery Problems

Aryaka Networks recently launched a new CDN in the market that is purpose built for B2B enterprise content delivery, something a bit different than what most CDNs are offering today. Those who track the CDN market have probably never heard of Aryaka before because the company focuses on cloud based WAN solutions that have been deployed across 3000 customer sites in 280 cities and 48 countries. Their value proposition is an enterprise grade private core network with a built-in proprietary software stack for WAN optimization and application acceleration.

Aryaka’s founder and CEO, Ajit Gupta earlier founded Speedera Networks, which was a acquired by Akamai for $130M in 2005. Aryaka brings together an integrated optimization platform for all applications, both, inside and outside the firewall with best practices from WAN Optimization and CDN to introduce a content and application acceleration solution on a private network. A CDN purpose built for the enterprise, which aims to be disruptive in the market.

As websites have become increasingly personalized and interactive, the percentage of dynamic content on the web continues to grow and replace static content as the predominant form of content on the web. In parallel, the push for applications into the cloud is becoming real. Enterprises are putting a web front end on CRM and ERP applications to make them easier to use from any browser worldwide. Providing acceptable user experience to these applications is critical to enhancing brand reputation and sales conversion capabilities.

Traditional CDNs from the late 1990s were built for a read-only web where they delivered faster load times by caching static content closer to the end users. Today, most traditional CDN vendors continue to serve static content along with streaming video while a handful have successfully expanded their products to offer dynamic site acceleration services through middle mile improvement with TCP optimization, intelligent routing, connection management, SSL acceleration and dynamic compression. These solutions are built over the public internet and congestion, packet loss, latency and jitter are common on intercontinental Internet links.

Aryaka says the global cache eviction policy of these CDN vendors dictates that B2B enterprise content suffers heavily as it competes with cache space that is monopolized by large content providers/aggregators whose content is more frequently accessed because of its popularity. This means that with many traditional CDNs, B2B enterprises don’t get the same level of value as content providers with popular content would get, which is why Aryaka is focusing on B2B enterprise content delivery with their new offering.

Aryaka’s says that one of their differentiators is that their CDN delivers content over a stable, low latency, private core network built for enterprise content delivery. Unlike traditional CDNs offering static caching or dynamic acceleration, the middle mile is both intelligent and private, a key differentiator. This ensures that customers are not subject to the vagaries of the public internet, especially across long distances. The private core offers consistency in performance compared to the Internet, no matter the time of day or traffic spikes due to global events. Aryaka’s customers use the private core network for data acceleration as well as real-time TCP and UDP based traffic.

Aryaka has also designed and implemented a multi-segment TCP optimization stack optimized differently across the first, middle and last mile – not just from the origin out to the edge like some other CDNs. The multi-segment stack is unique because it takes advantage of the underlying network characteristics which are known and predictable on the private middle mile. As a result, Aryaka says this results in superior bi-directional dynamic content acceleration for enterprise customers who continue to deploy web and IP based applications, as well as real-time data and APIs in their websites. With the growing importance of user generated content in the form of uploads, posts, forms, etc., Aryaka promises their customers a much faster experience for all traffic.

All of Aryaka’s customers get access to a multi-tier cache system providing what they say has better performance, significant gains for increasing cache hit rate and reduces connections to the origin.  This allows Aryaka’s CDN to achieve significant gains over other vendors in reducing the total load that the customer’s server needs to handle per user for both cached and dynamic content. For static content, Aryaka has implemented a large memory cache that enables faster content access compared to physical disks that are used by many CDN vendors. Each customer is assigned certain resources which ensures they are not affected by unfair cache eviction due to the popularity of other customers’ content even if delivered off the same server.

Aryaka’s CDN is purpose-built for the B2B enterprise and they are not focused on broadcasters and social media companies with large bandwidth and commodity delivery requirements. B2B enterprises do not have to fear competition for cache performance due to large video, social media or ecommerce and retail content that is popular and therefore more frequently accessed. Aryaka’s network has 25 globally distributed POPs in Tier 3+ datacenters worldwide and are strategically located just 30 milliseconds away from 90% of the world’s business users.

While some CDN players still continue to commoditize and crowd the low end of the industry, while trying to move up the value add services chain, it’s certainly interesting to see Aryaka Networks taking a different approach by going after customers at the high-end of the market. They have become an interesting company to keep an eye on and I’m watching them closely for when they share data points on how quickly they are growing their business and what their CDN deployments look like. You don’t hear the term B2B used often when talking about CDN services, and Aryaka is out in the market to prove that they have a unique and unparalleled understanding of specific customer needs for B2B enterprises when it comes to content delivery.