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Cdns Extend to Web Performance Optimization and End-To-End Cloud Services 2 For: Application CDNs Extend To Web Performance Development & Delivery Optimization And End-To-End Cloud Professionals Services by Mark Grannan and Philipp Karcher, July 31, 2014 KEY TAKEAWAYS CDN Services Are Evolving To Tackle Mobile And Dynamic Complexity CDN providers are no longer focused on bit pushing services as those services have become largely commoditized. Vendors in the CDN and digital acceleration market are increasingly focused on web performance optimization techniques to meet dynamic content and mobile needs. Parallel Technology Buying Decisions Blur CDN Boundaries Buying CDN services is no longer simple. Web security, cloud storing and hosting adoption, enterprise app complexity, and web analytics needs all factor into CDN purchasing decisions due to the overlaps. Customers need to understand where the overlaps exist to make smart investments. Match Your Performance Needs Against The CDN Landscape’s Four Segments The four market segments include: traditional CDNs that sell bit pushing as a service and aggregate broader capabilities; telco CDNs that add Internet connectivity to the traditional CDN package; cloud platforms that offer basic CDN features to complement storage and compute; and startups that offer caching (primarily) as a feature and focus on newer web performance techniques. Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA Tel: +1 617.613.6000 | Fax: +1 617.613.5000 | www.forrester.com FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS JULY 31, 2014 CDNs Extend To Web Performance Optimization And End-To- End Cloud Services Market Overview: CDN And Digital Acceleration Services By Mark Grannan and Philipp Karcher with John R. Rymer, Mike Gualtieri, Andre Kindness, Michael Facemire, Stephen Powers, Rick Holland, and Steven Kesler WHY READ THIS REPOrt Content delivery networks (CDNs) have been around for over 20 years, yet intensifying digital performance requirements are forcing CDN providers to evolve. CDN vendors are still focused on speeding content delivery, but are expanding their performance techniques to address the challenges of mobile and dynamic sites. Application development and delivery (AD&D) teams evaluating CDNs must now also consider their adjacent services — including security, storage, and analytics — that can improve digital performance. This report will help you understand which vendors offer the core and adjacent CDN services to meet your digital performance needs. Table Of Contents Notes & Resources 2 CDNs Evolve To Meet AD&D’s Intensifying Forrester interviewed 12 vendor and Digital Performance Needs four user companies, including Akamai Technologies, Amazon, CDNetworks, Core CDN Services Extend Beyond Caching CloudFlare, EdgeCast Networks (Verizon), Objects To Web Performance Optimization Instart Logic, Level 3 Communications, Value-Add Services Have Become Key Limelight Networks, MetaCDN, Microsoft, Considerations For Certain Buyers and Yottaa. 6 CDN Providers Fall Into Four Categories Related Research Documents Traditional CDNs Branch Out To Address Other Areas Of Digital Delivery Complexity CDN And Digital Acceleration Vendor Landscape, Q3 2014 Operators And Telcos Combine CDN With IP July 31, 2014 Transit Services Quick Take: Akamai Acquires Prolexic, Startups Focus On New Approaches To Deliver Doubling Down On DDoS Mitigation Services Performance December 4, 2013 Cloud Platform Providers Add CDN To Their Fuse Business Acceleration Technologies To Toolkits Optimize User Experiences May 8, 2013 RECOMMENDATIONS CDN Road Map: New Solutions Storm The 8 Treat Your CDN Investment As A Digital Performance Maturity Curve Market May 22, 2009 10 Supplemental Material © 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. To purchase reprints of this document, please email [email protected]. For additional information, go to www.forrester.com. FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS CDNs Extend To Web Performance Optimization And End-To-End Cloud Services 2 CDNS EVOLVE TO MEET AD&D’s INTENSIFYING DIGITAL PERFORMANCE NEEDS Digital performance — as measured by page speed, site uptime, and other metrics — matters because it affects your bottom line. Forrester data shows that visitors who find it difficult to accomplish their goals on a website switch to a more expensive channel (most often the phone), take their business to a competitor, or give up entirely.1 AD&D teams need to mitigate the impact of geographic expansions on their site’s latency, sudden events that spur unprecedented peak traffic loads, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that threaten to take down their site entirely. But AD&D can’t afford to merely maintain acceptable levels; they must continuously optimize performance as: ■ Incremental performance correlates with conversions. The correlation of page load times with views, conversions, and customer satisfaction is well established. For example, in 2009, Amazon cited a 1% loss in sales per 100ms of latency. In 2012, Walmart.com demonstrated increased conversion rates of up to 2% for every second of performance improvement.2 ■ Competitive pressures from digital pure-plays are rising. Digital disruptors are forcing firms to increasingly focus on digital channels: 41% of North American and European firms believe digital has already disrupted their industry and more than half believe they will see even more disruption this year.3 Start-ups and digital pure plays will eat traditional enterprises’ lunch if they don’t treat digital channels seriously. ■ Page load times are actually getting worse. Although broadband connection speeds continue to increase, so do page load times as the average website payload grows, dynamic sites use complex logic to display complex rendering that can’t be cached, and mobile devices further away from origin servers request content that hasn’t been optimized for them. Radware’s annual benchmark shows the median web page takes 9.3 seconds to load — a 21% slowdown in the past 12 months.4 Despite CDN services existing for more than 20 years, many web developers, architects, and engineers are new to buying and using content delivery network and digital acceleration services. A Forrester survey in 2012 on behalf of Akamai Technologies found that only 21% of respondents reported using a CDN to improve the performance of their applications. Only 20% of firms reported measuring the revenue impact of page load delays! As web development groups adapt their architectures and application designs to accommodate mobile devices, larger payloads, and more dynamic content, they must find techniques, technologies, and service providers to speed delivery of that content, and measure the impact of those efforts. Core CDN Services Extend Beyond Caching Objects To Web Performance Optimization Content delivery networks already play a critical role in optimizing the performance and availability of web content: Cisco predicts that 55% of all Internet traffic will cross CDNs by 2018 globally, up from 36% in 2013 — due in large part to the explosion of online video.5 The core CDN service of pushing bits is commoditized enough that it’s standard practice for large media companies to leverage multiple CDNs for price arbitrage and redundancy.6 As a result, CDNs have expanded their performance optimization services more broadly to encompass: © 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited July 31, 2014 FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS CDNs Extend To Web Performance Optimization And End-To-End Cloud Services 3 ■ Dynamic site acceleration (DSA) for non-cacheable content. DSA addresses network problems and issues of high latency. Much of your data-driven contextual, personalized, and customized content is impractical to cache. DSA augments the traditional CDN service by using CDN points of presence (PoPs) to deliver both static cached content as well as dynamic content coming from your origin servers. It accelerates dynamic content by optimizing routes, keeping connections open between PoPs, and applying tweaks at the network layer to maximize data transfer rates and efficiently recover from packet loss. ■ Front-end optimization (FEO) of the code and code delivery. Unlike DSA, which addresses a network problem, FEO manipulates code to optimize time-to-first-render and time-to-first- interaction by: 1) combining multiple CSS and JSS elements and images to make fewer roundtrip calls; 2) prioritizing elements, e.g., focusing on above the fold content first; and 3) compressing images. These techniques help particularly with sites not optimized for mobile. Adding FEO on top of a CDN with DSA has the strongest performance improvement. FEO is also where CDNs are delivering the most innovation today with several startups focused on this area. ■ End-to-end video services. Cisco’s Visual Networking Index projects IP video to be 79% of all traffic by 2018, up from 66% in 2013.7 Caching large objects like video and software updates continues to be the primary business (both in terms of traffic delivered and revenue) of traditional CDNs. CDNs have been growing the video side of their businesses by targeting media companies and publishers
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