Delve Sides With Akamai

Written by Ryan Lawler

Monday, August 3. 2009 at 03:00 PM EDT Post a comment

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By choosing to partner with Akamai Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM), online video platform provider Delve Networks became the latest competitor to throw its weight behind the content delivery network (CDN).

Last week, Delve announced a "strategic" partnership with Akamai, claiming in its blog that the firms had teamed up "to provide a better alternative to Brightcove." [Ed. note: Delve has since edited the post headline to remove the name of its competitor. Also missing is some bit about how Delve was "chosen" by Akamai for the relationship.]

It's not quite clear what's so strategic about this deal from Delve's point of view. After all, even though Akamai is far and away the industry leader in the CDN segment, it has never really been known for funneling business to companies that choose to partner with it.

Not just that, but by announcing the partnership, Delve joined several other video management platforms in choosing Akamai as its preferred CDN. In the past several months, VMIX Media Inc. , Kit Digital , and Ooyala Inc. have all announced similar partnerships with the CDN.

Despite the large number of partnership announcements involving Akamai, Jim Davis, analyst at The 451 Group , writes that the CDN isn't "doing anything unusual in the space or focusing any more effort on partnerships than it has in the past." Davis notes that the last few partnership announcements originated from the video platform providers themselves, not Akamai.

Which seems strange, because for Akamai, the benefit of having relationships with multiple video platform companies is clear.

"It's a good (and low cost) business development approach to finding new CDN customers at a time when such customers are hard to come by," Davis writes. "These arrangements have been feeding a good deal of volume toward the CDNs for some time."

In an earlier interview with Contentinople, Suzanne Johnson, senior industry marketing manager for media and entertainment at Akamai, noted that the company has multiple platform providers that it works with to "fill in any gaps" that may be missing from its product portfolio to meet certain customer requirements.

"We're always going to be improving and innovating on different technologies. We recognize that this is where the volume is, and we need to move up the stack and we're doing that," Johnson said.