Content Delivery From The Source —continued

Compared to tagged push solutions, on-going maintenance with Clearway is minimal. "We can avoid serving stale content because we can stop rewriting the HTML to redirect requests when content has been updated," said Globus. "While new content is being pushed to CDN servers, requests can be handled by the origin server. There's nothing you need to do to middleware to make dynamic content work correctly, because we make optimization decisions at the object level."

For obvious reasons, FireSite does not touch SSL-encrypted content.

Of course, speedy content delivery ultimately requires a robust, reliable distribution network. Clearway puts each customer's content on dozens of servers. "We're deploying to major NAPs with the goal of being a hop away in every network," said Globus. "We're in 3000 networks now. We need to get servers close enough to each NAP so that we can avoid the congestion that exists between NAPs today. Even putting servers in your POPs isn't good enough if browsers aren't connecting through those POPs."

To avoid down or slow CDN servers, each FireSite agent performs lightweight monitoring on the subset of the network that replicates its content.

Clearway tracking and reporting services quantify performance and reliability improvements. Real-time statistics include site speed, hits served, bandwidth used, server capacity, and traffic trends.

Launching the service
Clearway was founded in January 1996 and granted a CDN patent last year. According to Globus, "The essence of this patent is intelligent rewriting of objects and intelligent redirection — both crucial to content delivery." Clearway initially sold shrink-wrap software. But this approach can only bypass bottlenecks in the first mile. Pushing content to the edge of a global network is much more effective.

"By the time I became involved in late 1998," said Globus, "Clearway had started building a content delivery network. N+I Atlanta is really our coming out party. We've been aggressively going after initial customers in the past few weeks, since leaving beta stage."

One reseller that has been announced is Alabanza. Alabanza will use FireSite with its virtual web hosting services, a rollout that involves 600 servers with 140,000 sites.

"We have another nine or ten resellers signed who will be announced in early October," said Globus.

A FireSite agent is now available for RedHat 6.1/6.2 and Sun Solaris 2.7 with Apache or iPlanet web servers, and for Microsoft NT 4.0 IIS. "Each platform involves significant effort," said Globus. "Porting our agent is extremely complicated. With our initial platforms, we can handle 80-90% of our target market." To capture that last 10%, Clearway expects to eventually roll out one or two additional platforms.

The ISP Opportunity
"Getting technical talent is tough. If there's a way to provide better service without putting load on your staff, that's a good thing," said Globus. "We're trying to make CDNs easy for ISPs who offer hosting services. We focus on service providers who are building direct relationships with content providers."

Clearway's sales force has been calling on hosting companies to explain how the service works and its benefits. "We're finding that hosting companies already understand the benefits," said Globus. "So our priority has become helping them to strengthen relationships with existing customers by providing faster, more robust service."

Hosting partners resell FireSite to their own customer base. Clearway provides sales training, marketing support, and technical support. The partner can either install FireSite agents or have customers self-install the agent from Clearway's on-line site.

"After the install, we provide 24x7 support to answer any questions the ISP or its customers might have," said Globus. "Billing depends upon the hosting company. Some providers want us to bill customers directly. Others want to add FireSite as a line item on bills they send to their customers. In this case, we supply the data to enable billing."

Implicitly there is a storage limit, but Clearway prefers not to complicate pricing with this parameter. "If a customer needs a terabyte of storage, we'd rather handle this as an exception," said Globus. Clearway prices FireSite by peak capacity and payload.

"We're really not trying to compete on price," said Globus, "But we're effectively cheaper because we don't take thousands of dollars to set up. Competitive services are much, much harder to implement, and can't address businesses of all sizes. Our cost of sale is low because setup is easy and maintenance costs are negligible. We can reach more customers."

Of course, Clearway provides partner revenue sharing. Although Globus declined to cite reseller margins, he said "We're able to be extremely generous. Frankly, it's as cheap — if not cheaper — to offer an enormous piece of the gross than to sell FireSite to content providers ourselves."

Bottom line
CDNs are hot. ISPs looking for a piece of the action have three alternatives. Only the largest network providers — players like Digital Island, Genuity, and Cable & Wireless — can afford to engineer their own CDN. Internet access providers can broaden the reach of an existing CDN by joining partner programs offered by Akamai and others. Web hosters can add CDN to their business service portfolio by reselling a service like Clearway.

Clearway's approach is intriguing because it is turn-key — effectively an "instant CDN". Conceptually, making intelligent push decisions at the source is a sound approach. But adding software to the origin server is risky, and may be an uphill sale for cautious customers.

If Clearway can establish a track record and prove itself in the field, it has a good shot at becoming a big player in the burgeoning CDN market. In particular, Clearway's ability to tap the low end is attractive to providers that sell hosting services to the SMB market.

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