| Highwinds
Lands $55M, Enters CDN Market |
Written
by Ryan Lawler |
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Highwinds
Network Group Inc. announced the
launch of its new content delivery
network (CDN), along with new
funding and some partners that
will help it build out an end-to-end
solution for IPTV distribution.
The company, which touts a "channel-centric"
approach to content delivery,
received $55 million in financing
led by General Catalyst Partners
and Alta Communications . According
to Mark Hayes, Highwinds's vice
president of marketing and business
development, this funding came
on top of $70 million in financing
that the company has raised since
being founded in 2002.
Before launching its CDN, Highwinds
was largely a provider of multi-platform
IP services, including transport
and storage. According to Hayes,
Highwinds built its IP services
piece by scooping up companies
with network infrastructure and
then tying those network assets
together.
Those buys included data centers
and significant peering infrastructure,
which Hayes says gives Highwinds
a cost advantage in the CDN market:
"One of the ways to lower
costs is to have peering connections.
The cost of delivery is about
half of what our competitors'
costs are."
In addition to the funding, the
company is announcing Knack Networks
and Digital Rapids as partners
for the delivery of an end-to-end
IPTV solution. The partnership
will target professional media
customers.
The agreement combines Digital
Rapids hardware and software solutions
for content ingest, transcoding,
and delivery; Knack Networks IPTV
management platform; and the Highwinds
CDN. The resulting solution will
enable the firms to offer a turnkey
solution to content owners.
Highwinds says it will partner
with third-party content aggregators
and distributors that then resell
its content delivery services.
Hayes says the key to the partner
strategy is that it tightly integrates
with its partners and that it
won't try to steal its partners'
customers. Hayes claims that companies
providing video management and
other value-added services often
have a problem with larger CDN
providers like Akamai Technologies
Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM) and Limelight
Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: LLNW) attempting
to take customers away from them.
Stuart Ross, chairman of Knack
Networks, says before working
with Highwinds, his company could
not find a CDN partner that was
willing to deliver beyond best-effort
distribution.
"We worked with every CDN
in the business, hoping to find
solutions. There was lots of interest
and commitments but no real efforts
to work with us from an R&D
level," he says, but Highwinds
was different: Engineers from
both companies spent six months
working on how best to deliver
video over IP at a network level.
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