2009, 2010
Ttime for a quick look back on 2009. This was an important year for Jet Stream, VDO-X and StreamZilla:
StreamZilla 2009
In the midsts of the largest economical crisis ever, we launched a completely new StreamZilla service. So far, StreamZilla was an easy, simple all-format streaming service for small-medium European companies.
StreamZilla was repositioned as a premium streaming CDN, to be a perfect match for the enterprise / broadcasting market. Still focussed on streaming, no caching. New infrastructure, new technologies, new interfaces, new API’s. Powered by VDO-X. Higher pricing, yet still competitive. A brand new e-commerce website.
This strategy has worked. Due to the crisis we had lost some smaller accounts. These customers went out of business or stopped their online services. Fortunately many ‘legacy’ customers upgraded their account to the new StreamZilla service. We also saw an increase of new customers and especially larger accounts. We managed to grow in an industry that had zero growth. I’m glad we invested in this new StreamZilla.
In Europe, we now easily beat global CDNs on transparency, quality, performance, features, ease of use and customer support. And we are a great wholesale partner for many streaming / online video companies in Europe. The number of delivered videos further grew into the billions.
VDO-X
Unveiled in october 2008 on Streaming Media Europe, we launched our VideoExchange CDN suite in March 2009. VDO-X was developed in 2002 and further tuned until 2008, based on our original CDN technology from back in the mid 90′s. VDO-X was great CDN core technology for dynamic asset replication, geo load balancing, log processing and reporting.
We already shaved off many costs by not mixing up the CDN layer with the physical network layer. We also saved on costs by densifying the distribution layer. The CDN core layer itself automated popularity monitoring, dynamic asset distribution, geo load balancing and log processing.
With our own experience with the StreamZillaCDN we foresaw that all operational costs weren’t in the infrastructure anymore. The pain was in management and in customer support. To scale a CDN you would need a pretty large staff of engineers, operators and customer support employees.
We also had been working on the concept of CDN peering since 2002. So in 2008 we started an ambitious rewrite of the technology, with CDN peering and sharing features, and advanced web interfaces for management, reporting and content owner-self service. According to many, our CDN dashboards run circles around all other CDN interfaces.
We simplified the licensing model and translated documentation in English. We targeted for 3 licensed CDNs in 2009, hopefully one of them outside Europe. We did 10! With deployments in Europe, Russia, USA, Latin America. Used for web, mobile, OTT / IPTV. We have deployed more CDNs than other vendors did together. And we have a large order list for 2010.
Organization
Some companies stop their investments in a crisis year. We have the luxury position that we can invest in growth ourselves. We don’t have to find fundings. We moved to a larger office.
I hired new staff. So we could manage the StreamZilla transition, *and* further develop our technology *and* deploy and support more CDNs. It is great to see how flexible everyone is. Every year, the company changes (for the better :).
We don’t grow beyond what is needed today. Lean and mean is good for flexibility. Organic growth is good for stability. Our focus helps us get even better. We all have been working very hard, and I am proud of that.
It is also good to see that we get some recognition. Not just from customers who trust us to build their CDN, but also from the industry. We achieved a #10 ranking in the BeNeLux Fast 50 for fastest growing technology companies.
We also entered a number of interesting partnerships with companies such as IBM, Edgeware and we initiated some partnerships which I hope will be finalized in 2010. Can’t disclose anything about this.
2010?
Expect us to further invest in CDN scalability and robustness. We have already tuned the technology for #Gbps and #hits/sec. We see more room to further scale #assets, #accounts and #servers. And of course we will be announcing support for various http streaming technologies. Expect us to announce new technology, systems integration and infrastructure partnerships. Expect some cool new CDN products from StreamZilla. Expect us to announce more deployed CDNs in 2010.
Oh: we are hiring. I am looking for brilliant software engineers with streaming media and LAMP expertise. Send me your resume!
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