Transparent Caching Provider PeerApp Now Has 450 Deployments, New CEO

Transparent caching provide PeerApp has been pretty quiet over the past year, with new startup Qwilt seemingly getting all of the attention in the transparent caching space. Still the leader in the market, based on revenue, PeerApp is looking to accelerate their business and has a made a lot of new executive hires recently, including the appointment of a new CEO in June. This morning, the company announced they have added 50 new customers since the start of the year, and that their solution is now deployed at over 450 network operators and enterprises worldwide. The company also disclosed that many customers are managing 100-500 Gigabit capacity on PeerApp’s platform.

As I detailed in my last transparent caching report, I have some concerns around the long-term viability of the transparent cache as a stand-alone product. Content delivery and Web acceleration vendors are moving towards integrating transparent caching technology into a broader set of Web-optimization platforms. This will create a bigger ecosystem, faster deployment, and more traction for the technology as a whole, but it will also cause transparent caching to no longer be thought of as a stand-alone offering in the market. Vendors will need to move up the stack with their offerings and integrate their platforms into larger delivery ecosystems.

The other problem transparent caching vendors are encountering is the amount of HTTPS traffic (YouTube) that can’t be cached, deployed caches by Netflix directly, and the absolute destruction of per Mbps pricing that makes expanding the business very price sensitive. However, the good news is that the global transparent caching industry is still healthy and I expect it to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30.2% from 2012 to 2017. Content delivery on the web is constantly changing, requiring caches that must intelligently and dynamically identify and adapt to shifting content access patterns. Higher-quality video is coming, live video is exploding, operators are demanding better QoE and the market for transparent caching solutions is only going to accelerate.