Originally published on Tidalwire on June 20, 2002.
Content delivery networks (CDNs) and their increasingly popular private-network brethren - "enterprise CDNs" (ECDNs) - are big business. But the established vendors are seeing the playing field expand, as hungry new upstarts move to, well, eat their lunch.
A content delivery network, according to Meta Group, is defined as "a centrally managed collection of storage devices (caches) strategically placed on a network to enable the staging of Internet content closer to end users."
The market is getting hotter, driven by such expanding enterprise needs as elearning and other rich-media applications. Meta Group says the number of companies using CDNs increased 100 percent in 2001, to 2500, and that by 2005 the number could reach 14,000. Gartner, meanwhile, says 80 percent of enterprises will use ECDNs by 2006, for such applications as video on demand, while Frost and Sullivan predicts a $4 billion market as soon as 2003. All in the
