Skytide Blog

With consumption rates for online video growing at unprecedented levels, operator CDNs are heavily dependent on their servers to intelligently cache content at the network edge and deliver it close to the end customer. However, to realize the full potential from their networks, these CDNs must understand how to accurately plan for peak demand and precisely provision capacity.

To do so, operator CDNs must be able to gain a holistic view of traffic across all their edge servers — also called points of presence (PoPs) — not only to understand how the load on each is trending but also to make sure that each edge location is serving the intended geography.  Routing excess requests from a particular area through a server in a remote location can lead to video stream interruptions and other delays and inconveniences which detract from the end user’s experience.

The stakes are high. Inexact capacity planning often leads to service interruptions, reduced quality of experience, and inefficient use of network resources. To accurately predict peak demand and properly plan capacity then, operator CDNs must understand three essential metrics:

1. Peak bandwidth: the value in bytes per second of the highest 5-minute average bandwidth
2. Peak concurrent video streams: the maximum value of average concurrent streams of all the 5-minute periods
3. Peak hit rate:  requests per second, which provides a good sense for CPU utilization on the edge servers

Understanding these three factors in combination requires multidimensional analytics and reporting that can help operators to drill down to determine the popularity of specific assets, understand the content consumption patterns of their digital media customers and quickly determine the bandwidth demands  imposed on each edge location.

#3  Establish a Dedicated Sales Force

Contrary to popular wisdom, if you build a better CDN the world will not beat a path to your door. Building a superior content delivery network is just the beginning.

You will be competing with established CDNs that have battle-tested sales teams that have cultivated long-standing relationships with the customers you covet. To secure a piece of this business, you will need to:

• Establish a dedicated sales force and task them with the goal of leading prospects through the purchase process. Don’t expect your operations team to handle the sales effort. They are two very different disciplines.

• Assemble a team of experienced sales professionals and equip them with the tools that they need to successfully sell your CDN service. The competitive environment is fierce; established CDN providers will not cede business without a fight.

• Demand training from your technology vendors on the features that differentiate their platforms and the competitive advantage that those features will provide you against incumbent CDNs.

Skytide provides your sales team with the tools to persuasively communicate the advantages of your CDN analytics & reporting — powered by Skytide — over pure-play CDN providers. We have an established program to thoroughly train your sales team, complete with all the support materials you need to easily integrate it into your sales process (including RFP templates, data sheets, demo scripts, white papers, competitive comparison matrixes and more).

Read our white paper, “5 Ways Operator CDNs Can Land More Customers“

#2  Grab a Seat at the Multi-CDN Table

There was a time when a CDN could reasonably expect an exclusive relationship with a content provider, but those days are gone.

Today, content providers are increasingly utilizing a multi-CDN strategy to tap into benefits like an expanded footprint, better pricing leverage and a way to defer capital expenditures. Which means that Telco CDNs need to have a strategy in place to flourish in this multi-CDN environment, including:

• Have a program in place that routes traffic to backup CDNs in times of trouble.

• Go to market in partnership with multi-CDN control software vendors to assure integration and compliance.

• Implement such software as an internal fail-over mechanism invisible to your customers.

• Bid for part of a customer’s CDN business but request commitments of additional business if you achieve certain service level agreement (SLA) milestones.

• Utilize analytics that provide visibility into service quality — like requests by status code and cache status — that can be used to quickly pinpoint and remedy problems (and preempt your customers from shifting service to a one of its other CDNs.) Only Skytide can provide such multidimensional insight.

Read our white paper, “5 Ways Operator CDNs Can Land More Customers“

Over 40 Telco CDNs have now been deployed or are in development, lured by the prospects of greatly reduced transit costs and new revenue streams. But building out the CDN infrastructure is just the beginning. To be successful, operators must court and persuade content owners to become customers, a formidable task in a market saturated with established CDN alternatives.

In a series of posts we will spotlight the five best practices necessary for Telco CDNs to secure new customers and begin the process of validating their competitive advantages.

#1:  Demonstrate your CDN’s reliability and quality

Operator CDNs have significant advantages over legacy content delivery networks (e.g. owning the network enables you to cluster points of presence (PoPs) closer to the end user than third party CDNs can offer.) Which means that you should be able to deliver superior quality of service (QoS) over the likes of Akamai and Limelight Networks.

Prospective customers aren’t going to take your word for it, however.You’ll need to demonstrate your ability to provide measurably better QoS.

If you are a service provider that also operates an IPTV or OTT service, by all means, start to deliver that online video content over your own Telco CDN as soon as possible. Doing so will benefit you in two ways: It will demonstrate the faith that your company and its subsidiaries have in the new content delivery network; the proverbial “eating the dog food.” It will also provide an opportunity to work out any kinks in the service and establish a real-word case study based on empirical evidence. That way, you can sell a service that’s been proven at scale.

Read our white paper, “5 Ways Operator CDNs Can Land More Customers”