AT&T Unveils Enterprise CDN Service

Written by Ryan Lawler

Thursday, April 23. 2009 at 09:00 AM EDT Post a comment

Digg   Del.icio.us   Reddit   Email This

no ratings

• Login to Rate

AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) is looking to leverage its large enterprise customer base to increase revenues in its content delivery network (CDN) business, with this week's launch of CDN services aimed at accelerating rich media and file delivery in corporate networks.

AT&T's Private Content Distribution Service (PCDS) is designed to help enterprises deliver large video and other rich media files behind the corporate firewall, and to accelerate their distribution across corporate networks.

AT&T argues that by providing its own network infrastructure to facilitate large file transfers, it can reduce the amount of technical expertise enterprises require to enable similar file delivery across a corporate network on their own.

While some CDNs focus primarily on the media and entertainment segment, AT&T believes it can differentiate its service offering and drive adoption with its roster of customers in the enterprise market. In an interview with Contentinople last month, AT&T executive director of market development John Watson touted the company's commitment to offering CDN services to its corporate customers.

"We serve all 1,000 of the Fortune 1,000 companies," Watson said. "We're very stable, we are investing in the space, and we have trusted access to customers and the ability to sell into those customers."

While going after the enterprise market makes sense just based on AT&T's large customer base in that segment, it's also happening as enterprise demand for CDN services is rapidly growing. With video becoming more pervasive as a training and marketing tool for corporations, more of them are looking for CDN services that could help make it easier for them to manage distribution of those assets.

The growth of enterprise interest in CDN is not lost on other players in the market, either. Akamai Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM) has long been the leader in the enterprise segment, but others are entering the market. Most notably, Limelight Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: LLNW) announced the launch of its own enterprise product late last month.