Adero, Akamai Move Apps To The Edge
By Max Smetannikov, Inter@ctive Week
December 16, 1999 10:39 AM ET
zdnet.com
Credit-card transactions, ad insertion and search are the first three applications that content distributors Adero and Akamai Technologies plan to put on their virtual networks as early as next month.
Adero's Wednesday announcement with e-commerce transactions provider Open Market, together with Akamai's announcement today of a partnership with Direct Hit and Vignette, marks the biggest mutation yet in the brief history of content distributors.
"We will not limit the number of applications that people would want to put on the edge on the network," said Paul Cheng, Adero's founder and director of business development.
Launching services designed to deliver Web pages to Internet users faster, content distributors are now seizing upon virtual networks as the means of moving various Internet applications to the edge of the Net.
Akamai plans to start this process early next year, with the launch of a service called EdgeAdvantage. The first two applications to ride over the 1,700 servers that the Cambridge, Mass.-based content distributor has placed with 100 networks in 30 countries are Direct Hit's search and Vignette's ad insertion. Putting these applications on the edge will make Web pages appear even faster.
Adero goes one step further with its Open Market alliance, where each of its 50 nodes in 30 countries will act as a local transaction center.
This setup allows customers -content providers with virtual storefronts - to customize their content to users in different countries by choosing an appropriate language and form of payment.
"By using this worldwide service network that Adero is building, content providers that have a storefront on the Web can enable, for instance, their German customers to use their German credit cards - there are no snags anymore to get your e-business to operate globally," said Jay Fiore, Open Market's director of corporate marketing.
Neither Adero nor Akamai has yet figured out how to charge customers for the new services.
"There are many variables in how we could make this business model work. For instance, we could resell Vignette services, or Vignette could resell us as a value-added service," said George Kurian, vice president of product management and strategy at Akamai.
Adero, Akamai and other content distributors that might consider getting into the app business are following in the steps of San Francisco-based Digital Island, which last year pioneered the concept of "smart" nodes that "recognize" international users by their country of origin. The first application that Digital Island launched from this technology, dubbed TraceWare, was a smart ad placement mechanism aimed at pharmaceutical companies that legally can't target their ads to residents in the countries where they don't have adequate government clearance.
Digital Island acquired Akamai's biggest competitor, Sandpiper Networks, in October, giving the Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based content distributor technological know-how to overtake the competition in this new business of moving applications to the edge.
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