Speedera Networks

Last updated
Speedera Networks
Type Privately held
Industry Internet hosting services
Founded1999 (acquired by Akamai Technologies in 2005)
FounderAjit Gupta (CEO)
Rich Day (chief architect)
Eric Swildens (CTO)
Headquarters
Santa Clara, California
,
United States
Services Content delivery
Website www.speedera.com

Speedera Networks, founded in 1999, was a content delivery network (CDN) company that emerged in the late 1990s to advance technology applications for Internet communications and collaboration and became the first CDN to turn a profit. On June, 2005, Akamai acquired Speedera Networks.

Contents

A CDN is a distributed computing platform for global Internet content and application delivery, and some of the advantages it brought to the Internet and online users was dynamic imaging, flash video, faster website download times, increased site performance and improved business continuity and uptime. Speedera added a layer of security to Web sites, resulting in reduction of risk of distributed denial-of-service attacks and bandwidth hijacking.

History

A provider of distributed application hosting and content delivery services, Speedera was founded by Ajit Gupta (CEO), [1] Rich Day (chief architect), and Eric Swildens (CTO). [2] [3] The company was based in Santa Clara, California. [4] Speedera opened its second headquarters in Bangalore, India in 2002 to offer 24x7 operations and customer support as well as sales, marketing and additional R&D capacity. Investors backing Speedera included Stanford University and Trinity Ventures.

Despite the end of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and a large number of competitors (30-plus at that time), Speedera had patented technology, a significant cost advantage and a customer focused sales philosophy that enabled the company to survive the economic downturn and grow rapidly enough to eventually achieve a profitable annual revenue run rate of $60 million. In 2003 and 2004, both Deloitte & Touche and PricewaterhouseCoopers recognized Speedera as one of the top 10 fastest growing private companies in Silicon Valley and in North America.

The company initially was created to cache static Web content through its vast network and direct users to the optimum server through intelligent traffic management and quickly transformed itself to deliver dynamic imaging, rich dynamic content and accelerated Web applications using the same platform.

Speedera enabled companies to offer bandwidth-intensive content, graphics, and streaming media over the Web. It operated servers on more than 1,000 backbone networks in the Americas, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, putting the content physically closer to users, and speeding up downloads and streaming. Speedera built its network to more than 100 points-of-presence (PoPs) within ata centers in 20 countries.

Speedera at acquisition had more than 400 customers, including large companies. They included Fox Broadcasting Corporation, Amazon.com, Apple, Sony Music Entertainment, Nokia, Comcast, NASA, the European Space Agency, Walmart, Bank of America, Lowes, The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, The Weather Channel, Nissan, NPR, iFilm, Atom Shockwave, Univision, Sirius Satellite Radio, the National Hockey League, the U.S. National Guard, Hoovers, Tag Heuer, Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, Verizon, Yahoo, Intuit, Intel, AMD, Macromedia, McAfee, Network Associates, Symantec, RSA Security, Inc., Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Softbank, Sify, Satyam, Rediff and The Times of India.[4]

Channel partners included HP Services, Internap, Softbank Broadmedia/Club IT, Hitachi, AboveNet, and Inflow (Sungard).

Services

Speedera's services included streaming media, content delivery, failover, load balancing, security, visibility and management services, all based on its Global Traffic Management (GTM) platform and patented technology.

In 2005, Speedera announced FlexComputing. [5] FlexComputing enabled enterprises to rapidly deploy and update applications as needed in multiple hosting locations. FlexComputing represented the third stage of utility computing, a field in which Speedera had been a pioneer since its founding in 1999. The first stage entailed distributed caching of Web site content, particularly graphical objects. The next stage extended this model to downloadable media, video streaming files and whole site delivery. FlexComputing took the model one step further, to the third stage, by deploying customers` own applications on Speedera's global network and providing additional hosting capacity on demand for any distributed application running on an Intel platform. This distributed hosting solution enabled customer applications to be higher performing, more scalable, more reliable and more resistant to security attacks, while eliminating the need for customers to invest in added server and network infrastructure.

Patents

Speedera was issued 21 patents [6] ranging from load balancing to integrated point of presence (PoP) server networks. Twelve of those were issued to co-founder and CEO Ajit Gupta. These patents included:


* Dynamic image delivery system
* Global traffic management system using IP anycast routing and dynamic load-balancing
* Performance computer network method
* Method for determining metrics of a content delivery and global traffic management network
* Integrated point of presence server network
* Content delivery and global traffic management network system
* Secure content delivery system
* Load balancing service
* Load balancing array packet routing system
* Performance computer network method
* Content delivery and global traffic management network system
* Load balancing service
* Method and system for generating and providing rich media presentations optimized for a device over a network
* Method and apparatus for determining latency between multiple servers and a client
* Scalable domain name system with persistence and load balancing
* Method and system for delivering and monitoring an on-demand playlist over a network using a template
* Scalable domain name system with persistence and load balancing
* Content delivery and global traffic management network system
* Performance computer network method
* User device and system for traffic management and content distribution over a worldwide area network
* Integrated point of presence server network

Company

Notable events

Speedera hosted some of the largest trafficked events on the Internet in its time including NASA's twin Mars Rover mission, and China's annual Spring Festival. The company also created SpeedRank, an Internet Performance Index that compared performance and availability of the world's best and least performing web sites, which included download summaries, details and errors.

Speedera launched a number of technology firsts in the Content Delivery Network market category including: Site Analyzer, Whole Site Delivery, Secure Streaming, Secure Flash, Failover, Traffic Balancer, Origin Site Integration, SpeedEye Access Manager, Smart Storage Manager and SinoCDN (a joint CDN with China).

Speedera's category-defining set of services included:

As a reward for performance, the entire staff of Speedera was flown to Hawaii in 2003. In 2005, the entire staff and their families, based in Bangalore and Silicon Valley, were also flown to Hawaii. [7]

In February 2002, Akamai Technologies filed a lawsuit claiming that Speedera's content delivery network services infringed on Akamai patents. [8]

In June 2002, Speedera's three co-founders received U.S. Patent 6,405,252 covering the global traffic management and content delivery technologies of its network. [9]

In March 2005, Speedera Networks was acquired by Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) for a stock transaction worth about $130 million. [1] [10] The acquisition was completed in June 2005. [11]

Investors

Speedera Networks was a privately held company funded by leading Silicon Valley companies, venture capitalists, a world-class university and others including:

Awards

Philanthropy

In 2003, CEO Ajit Gupta established a "Giving Back" philanthropy program for Speedera that provided free Internet infrastructure services to not-for-profit organizations, including Unicef.org, Goodwill Industries International, Autism.org, and the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

In response to the deadly Christmas tsunami of 2004 in the Indian Ocean, Speedera assisted UNICEF and other relief and recovery organizations by allocating a percentage of its infrastructure at no cost to ensure the expansion and availability of their websites to accept contributions and help victims and other families communicate with each other. It also provided pro bono services to a number of other organizations working towards a worthy cause.

Related Research Articles

Load balancing (computing) Set of techniques to improve the distribution of workloads across multiple computing resources

In computing, load balancing is the process of distributing a set of tasks over a set of resources, with the aim of making their overall processing more efficient. Load balancing can optimize the response time and avoid unevenly overloading some compute nodes while other compute nodes are left idle.

Akamai Technologies American computer networking company

Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an American content delivery network (CDN), a cybersecurity, and cloud service company, providing web and Internet security services. Akamai's Intelligent Edge Platform is one of the world's largest distributed computing platforms. The company operates a network of servers around the world and rents out capacity on these servers to customers who want their websites to work faster by distributing content from locations near the user. When a user navigates to the URL of an Akamai customer, their browser is directed by Akamai's domain name system to a proximal edge server that can serve the requested content. Akamai's mapping system assigns each user to a proximal edge server using sophisticated algorithms such as stable matching and consistent hashing, enabling more reliable and faster web downloads. Further, Akamai implements DDoS mitigation and other security services in its edge server platform.

Content delivery network Layer in the internet ecosystem addressing bottlenecks

A content delivery network, or content distribution network (CDN), is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially relative to end users. CDNs came into existence in the late 1990s as a means for alleviating the performance bottlenecks of the Internet as the Internet was starting to become a mission-critical medium for people and enterprises. Since then, CDNs have grown to serve a large portion of the Internet content today, including web objects, downloadable objects, applications, live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social media sites.

Edgio American information technology company

Edgio, Inc., formerly Limelight Networks, Inc., is an American company that provides a content delivery network (CDN) service, used for delivery of digital media content and software. As of February 2020, the company's network has more than 130 points-of-presence and delivers with 70+ terabits per second of egress capacity across the globe.

An application delivery network (ADN) is a suite of technologies that, when deployed together, provide availability, security, visibility, and acceleration for Internet applications such as websites. ADN components provide supporting functionality that enables website content to be delivered to visitors and other users of that website, in a fast, secure, and reliable way.

Coradiant was an American software developer that developed products for managing and troubleshooting Web Applications. BMC Software, Inc acquired Coradiant on 28 April 2011 for $130 million in cash.

Founded in 2000, CDNetworks is a full-service content delivery network (CDN) which provides technology, network infrastructure, and customer services for the delivery of Internet content and applications. The company is positioning itself as a multinational provider of content delivery services, with a particular emphasis on emerging Internet markets, including South America, India and China. The company's content delivery network consists of 1,500 Point of Presence (PoPs) on five continents. Services include CDN, video acceleration, DDoS protection, cloud storage, cloud access security broker (CASB), web application firewall (WAF) and managed DNS with cloud load balancing. Key differentiators include a large number of global PoPs, good network presence in China and Russia, and high-profile clients such as Forbes, Samsung and Hyundai. CDNetworks has offices in the U.S., South Korea, China, Japan, UK and Singapore.

Coyote Point Systems was a manufacturer of computer networking equipment for application traffic management, also known as server load balancing. In March 2013, the company was acquired by Fortinet.

StreamZilla is a streaming media hosting and content delivery network (CDN) in Europe. The company is located in the Mediacentrale in the city Groningen, Netherlands.

Rackspace Cloud Cloud computing platform

The Rackspace Cloud is a set of cloud computing products and services billed on a utility computing basis from the US-based company Rackspace. Offerings include Cloud Storage, virtual private server, load balancers, databases, backup, and monitoring.

Dynamic Infrastructure is an information technology concept related to the design of data centers, whereby the underlying hardware and software can respond dynamically and more efficiently to changing levels of demand. In other words, data center assets such as storage and processing power can be provisioned to meet surges in user's needs. The concept has also been referred to as Infrastructure 2.0 and Next Generation Data Center.

Ajit Gupta

Ajit Gupta was a Silicon-Valley based entrepreneur and the founder of Aryaka, AAyuja, JantaKhoj, and Speedera Networks. He holds 21 technology patents for Internet content delivery and global traffic management. Ajit Gupta graduated from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee in Electrical Engineering Batch of 1984.

Aryaka is a company that provides wide-area software-defined network ( SD-WAN) connectivity and application delivery. Aryaka is headquartered in San Mateo, California with additional offices located in London, United Kingdom, Bengaluru, India, Beijing, China, and Singapore.

Imperva Incapsula is an American cloud-based application delivery platform. It uses a global content delivery network to provide web application security, DDoS mitigation, content caching, application delivery, load balancing and failover services.

HP Cloud Set of cloud computing services

HP Cloud was a set of cloud computing services available from Hewlett-Packard (HP) that offered public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, managed private cloud, and other cloud services. It was the combination of the previous HP Converged Cloud business unit and HP Cloud Services, which is the OpenStack technology-based public cloud. It was marketed to enterprise organizations to combine public cloud services with internal IT resources to create hybrid clouds, or a mix of private and public cloud environments, from about 2011 until 2016.

Ramesh Sitaraman is an Indian American computer scientist known for his work on distributed algorithms, content delivery networks, streaming video delivery, and application delivery networks. He helped build the Akamai content delivery network, one of the world's largest distributed computing platforms. He is currently in the computer science department at University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Cloud load balancing is a type of load balancing that is performed in cloud computing. Cloud load balancing is the process of distributing workloads across multiple computing resources. Cloud load balancing reduces costs associated with document management systems and maximizes availability of resources. It is a type of load balancing and not to be confused with Domain Name System (DNS) load balancing. While DNS load balancing uses software or hardware to perform the function, cloud load balancing uses services offered by various computer network companies.

Instart was an American multinational computer technology corporation, headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The company specialized primarily in developing and marketing a Digital Experience Cloud that improves web and mobile application performance, consumer experience and security. The company marketed and sold to large enterprises that seek to achieve higher digital revenue, increased on-line conversion, faster website performance, improved consumer experience and better online security.

Netflix is an American-based company that offers a service for streaming movies and TV series over the Internet. Several technical innovations were required to provide it.

SAP Converged Cloud Private computing cloud

SAP Converged Cloud is a private managed cloud developed and marketed by SAP.

References

  1. 1 2 "Akamai to Acquire Speedera Networks". Press Release. Akamai Technologies, Inc. 2005-03-16.
  2. ↑ "Speedera: Web Without the Wait". EContentmag.com. 2002-04-01.
  3. ↑ "Eric Swildens receives honor with place in UMD science academy". BusinessNorth. 2004-12-29.
  4. ↑ "Speedera Networks, Inc. Company Profile". Yahoo! Inc.
  5. ↑ "Speedera Launches FlexComputing". www.ip97.com. Archived from the original on 29 March 2006. Retrieved 13 January 2022.
  6. ↑ "Error".
  7. ↑ "Staff motivation? Take them to Hawaii".
  8. ↑ "Akamai sues Speedera". Network World Fusion. 2002-02-14. Archived from the original on 2013-07-19.
  9. ↑ "Speedera Wins Patent for Core Content Delivery Technology". Press Release. PR Newswire. 2002-06-26.
  10. ↑ Hines, Matt (2005-03-16). "Akamai snaps up rival Speedera". CNET. Retrieved 2020-03-26.
  11. ↑ "Akamai Completes Acquisition of Speedera Networks". Press Release. Akamai Technologies, Inc. 2005-06-13.
9 ^ "Speedera Networks Again Rated One of the Fastest Growing Private Companies in Silicon Valley" Hostbyte.com 2004-10-15

10 ^ "Staff Motivation? Take Them to Hawaii" Rediff 2005-06-04

11 ^ "All Work...and More Play" The Hindu Business Line 2005-06-13

12 ^ "Now Sales Being Outsourced to India" Rediff 2004-09-11

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.