Tata enters CDN market

Tata Communications, a global network services provider focused on emerging markets, is the latest service provider to enter the content delivery network (CDN) market, teaming up with BitGravity on its offering, announced this week. The new Tata CDN network includes 300 points of presence globally, and its managed service offerings include CDN, CDN Plus, CDN Secure (for distribution and protection of media assets) and LiveBroadcast, a flash-based streaming service for live events.

CDNs are likely to be a new area of focus for service providers as the need to move rich media such as video and gaming applications continues to grow. Tata is taking a different approach to the CDN market that the service provider believes is better suited to handle that growth, said Srinivasa Addepalli, Tata’s senior vice president of corporate communications and strategy.

“We have been looking at getting into content delivery for some time, and in our evaluation, we chose BitGravity as the most appropriate technology for the new Internet and Web 2.0 applications that we are seeing,” Addepalli said. “Their technology is different from the old caching kind of approach that traditional CDNs have taken. That was okay for the Internet as we knew it, but it’s not really appropriate for the Internet for the next 10 years, when video, content-sharing and peer-to-peer communications are going to predominate.”

As part of the deal, Tata invested $11.5 million in BitGravity, and its chief technology officer, John Hayduk, is taking a seat on the equipment vendor’s board of directors.

Proxy caching, which is used today by CDN leader Akamai Technologies and others, has the potential to introduce delay, said Hon Kit Lam, Tata’s director of IP product development and global IP and VPN solutions.