Voxel Networks Politics, Radio & Gossip

Written by Ryan Lawler

Wednesday, January 16. 2008 at 07:00 AM EST Post a comment

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If you haven't heard of Voxel, one of the newer entrants in the CDN market, you probably aren't alone. That's because up until recently, "We haven't spent any effort or money on advertising, PR, or marketing," CEO Raj Dutt says. "We're very late in the game when it comes to things like that."

The company is now looking to correct that, making a push beyond its managed hosting roots and into the exciting world of content delivery. Besides that, they decided to talk to us.

According to Dutt, the company started out in 1999 in Troy, N.Y. (really!), but "things went slowly over the next three years as the whole dot-com thing exploded." Business picked up in 2002 and 2003, as Voxel worked on becoming a high-bandwidth managed hosting company for very high traffic sites. Due to the amount of traffic it was peering, it built out an additional IP network in 2005.

With its own network in place, Voxel naturally began to think about leveraging it to offer CDN services, which it launched in early 2007.

Now, the company hopes that its combination of managed hosting and content delivery offerings will appeal to customers. "The average CDN customer has a need for managed hosting in addition to CDN services, "Dutt says.

Right now the company appears to have a following in some highly trafficked blog sites. Hosting customers that have been using its CDN services include sites such as DailyKos and PerezHilton.com. But perhaps more importantly, the company is gaining interest from content providers looking for CDN-only services.

The best example so far is Radio IO, an online streaming music station which had previously used Limelight Networks for its CDN services. According to Dutt, Radio IO signed on just for CDN services, but soon was using Voxel's managed hosting services as well.

"They signed up just for CDN, but within three to four months we had taken their whole business in-house," Dutt says.

Voxel is looking for more business like this, but it could become increasingly difficult as the CDN market becomes increasingly crowded. The number of CDNs is growing dramatically, so smaller players like Voxel will need to differentiate themselves to gain market traction.

Dutt acknowledges this, and suggests that his company's breadth of services should help set it apart. "Our position is that the CDN market is going to look very much like the hosting service market, in terms of commoditization. Our model of being able to be responsible for more will set us apart," he says.