Table of Contents
- Summary
- Geographical Distribution
- Key Criteria Comparison
- GigaOm Radar
- Vendor Insights
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About Andrew Green
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
The content delivery market has many participants. Most of these are purpose-built content delivery networks (CDNs), but a large portion of players, including cloud providers and telecommunications companies, are leveraging their distributed infrastructure to enter the market. While many CDNs featured in this report are evolving their offerings into edge platforms, some purpose-built edge platforms are also notable players in the content delivery space.
The key criteria on which we evaluate vendors paint a high-level picture of the use cases these vendors support. Depending on their vertical, enterprise IT buyers have different needs that must be met by CDNs. For example, a media company is generally interested in a CDN’s capability to deliver streaming video. Within this vertical, streaming services may need to use only on-demand video streaming of stored content, while broadcasters of live events need deep live video streaming features.
At the same time, an ecommerce company would require dynamic content delivery optimization that can compress, resize, and crop thousands of product images based on the end-user’s device type. Storage features are a must-have for businesses that need to deliver large files and for use cases such as software updates, for which caching is not sufficient.
While the key criteria mentioned above serve some verticals more than others, the rest permeate all industries and involve the ways a solution is managed and secured. Security for content delivery must encompass two main areas: network security and content security. Network security—between Layers 2 and 4—is a table stake and addressed by the provider with no involvement from the customer. Content security—Layer 7—includes modules such as web application firewalls (WAFs) and provides customers with a management plane so they can determine how to filter traffic and respond to anomalies.
Content management and programming, traffic optimization, and analytics are also vertical-agnostic features and offer enterprises the ability to deliver their content, regardless of what it is, in a more efficient manner.
This GigaOm Radar report highlights key CDN vendors and equips IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements. In the corresponding GigaOm report “Key Criteria for Evaluating CDN Solutions,” we describe in more detail the key features and metrics that are used to evaluate vendors in this market.
How to Read this Report
This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding, consider reviewing the following reports:
Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.
GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.
Solution Profile: An in-depth vendor analysis that builds on the framework developed in the Key Criteria and Radar reports to assess a company’s engagement within a technology sector. This analysis includes forward-looking guidance around both strategy and product.