Verivue unveils new CDN platform, new usage cap thinking

Content delivery network enabler Verivue is rolling out the newly integrated, freshly named software platform that resulted from its 2010 acquisition of CoBlitz. It also has some food for thought for carriers that are thinking about turning to controversial broadband usage caps to manage increasing traffic.

Verivue this week introduced the OneVantage content delivery solution, which combines the company’s pre-acquisition CDN software elements with over-the-top video elements obtained from last fall’s CoBlitz buy. Verivue CEO Jim Dolce said the platform has the end-to-end capabilities—high-performance cache, a request router for dynamic cache selection, and a full management and analytics suite—to help service providers create in-house CDNs instead of outsourcing them to third parties.

“Carriers spend a lot of money building their own optical networks, but then for the content delivery layer, they go to a third party,” said Dolce. “It seems like that is the part that should be brought in-house.”

In particular, the OneVantage solution is designed to handle both small content objects, like conventional HTML, thumbnail images and social media elements, and large objects, like the live and on-demand streamed video becoming increasingly popular through services such as Netflix.

That extensibility, according to Dolce, can give service provider CDNs the ability to cache greater varieties of content, and should give carriers alternative choices when considering usage caps as a response to increasing video traffic.

“Usage caps are derived out of necessity,” Dolce said. “I don’t think the carrier wants to use caps. CDNs can be part of the alternative. You can use CDNs to lower the cost of uncompensated traffic and make it more bearable by caching more of it locally, or you may be able to compensation for traffic by selling CDN services.

Expanding on the latter point, Dolce said a broader CDN software platform comes with broader applications for the technology—not only bandwidth optimization through transparent caching, but also preparation of video content for multi-screen distribution; the ability to construct regional, multi-tenant CDNs to generate more revenue; acceleration of mobile data applications by embedding CDN technology into the mobile network; and integration of CDNs onto the front end of cloud services to improve cloud performance.

Verivue announced that Poland’s TP Group, a unit of France Telecom, is the first carrier to deploy its new, integrated platform.