Posts Tagged Akamai
Ride The Wave
Dan Rayburn has another nice article out this morning, this one detailing his recent visit to Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM). It’s generally very positive about the company, and given Dan’s readership, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a nice bump in the stock today, all other things being equal.
In past discussions with Akamai, management has hinted to me that most of the analysts covering the stock don’t completely “get” its business model and in particular, its sustainable advantages. To do so requires a fair amount of technical acumen, and so I’m not surprised.
I do not see Akamai being disrupted in the short-term. Dan does a nice job in his piece of dispelling the myth of a CDN price war that has kept a lid on its stock price over the past couple of quarters. Certainly others such as Limelight Networks (NASDAQ: LLNW) and Level3 (NASDAQ: LVLT) can deliver content more cheaply, but not at the service levels many clients require. Really, it’s in the [delivery x service] product where Akamai shines.
One day, transit bandwidth may be an order of magnitude cheaper, and everyone will have 100 Mb/s or more of sustained bandwidth entering their homes (I wish). But that time is far off in the future. As long as Shannon’s Law holds, and people continue to ramp their media consumption via the internet, there will be a need for the kind of optimizing technology Akamai provides.
In the intermediate term there’s nothing I see that would indicate severe headwinds for Akamai. They recently won an intellectual property suit against Limelight, and in general have a solid IP portfolio. They are the market leader, have very high profit margins, and continue to dominate the high end for CDN and application acceleration services, both of which are expected to enjoy double digit growth rates in the coming years.
My view is that they’re currently undervalued (though not drastically) and should enjoy steady appreciation for some time.
2 comments April 8, 2008
Pando Bears
Dan Rayburn has a note out this morning about the lack of traction that P2P vendors such as Pando Networks and BitTorrent are experiencing with Content Delivery Networks. Dan’s the most knowledgeable guy I’ve read about CDNs, and I agree with him here. P2P certainly has its commercial uses, but as Dan points out:
From what I can tell in the market, P2P is not as big of a story as it was at the end of last year. The topic has cooled off a bit except when its being discussed as it pertains to carriers blocking or filtering of P2P based traffic on their networks. Aside from that, customers are not asking me about P2P and 55.2% of those we surveyed about their content delivery needs said they did not plan to even look at P2P as a delivery solution for 2008.
Cost is usually touted as the primary reason to use P2P for content delivery, and as I’ve argued before, this won’t scale–ISPs will eventually demand their pound of flesh, one way or another. Plus, as Dan says over and over, cost isn’t even the most important factor for most content providers. My view is that P2P will eventually take its place as a valuable niche method for video delivery, and several of the larger players will gain traction (and/or be acquired). But it’s likely to remain a total delivery solution only for file traders and small content owners.
Add comment April 3, 2008
When Down Becomes Up
Silicon Alley Insider has a short interview with BitTorrent CEO Doug Walker about plans to entice the media Big Boys to use BT’s peer-to-peer delivery service. Walker claims he can undercut the likes of Akamai and Limelight Networks.
P2P does a great job of file transfer. Streaming? Not so much.
Streaming via P2P doesn’t use any less bandwidth that streaming directly. It just uses somebody else’s bandwidth. So yes, it can be “cheaper”, but this is virtual savings, not real savings. Once P2P streaming delivery gets big enough–if it ever does–the ISPs will step in and demand their share. This is what the whole net neutrality thing is about. In fact it’s already happening, with Comcast selectively blocking some P2P clients. Even if there’s no direct royalty to the telcablecos, sooner or later their bandwidth gets chewed up, and then they raise prices to consumers.
This thing won’t scale. It runs up against the fundamental problems of the Internet in the U.S.: lack of edge capacity and asymmetric bandwidth.
Most internet connections are designed to be timeshared. Your advertised 2 Mb/s (or 10 Mb/s) link only gets that kind of speed if no one else in your neighborhood is using theirs. Cable systems often have a 500:1 share ratio. Even DSL is shared in a way, limited by capacity at the DSLAM in the central office (and it’s typically slower to start with). Which all works fine for web pages where it’s a quick download between idle times. But video streaming of any kind runs into real problems with enough simultaneous users, because there’s a minimum sustained rate that must be achieved to avoid jitter and/or buffering.
What makes the problem worse for P2P is that almost all internet connections are asymmetric; the upstream bandwidth is an order of magnitude slower than downstream. This is because the phone and cable companies–with their heads firmly in the sand–never envisioned the internet as anything other than a way to shove increasingly expensive media down consumer throats. That is, after all, the model they were founded on. But P2P and User Generated Content are turning that notion on its head.
So we have too little bandwidth, and it’s increasingly pointed in the wrong direction anyway.
Streaming via P2P works fine on a small scale (Joost’s beta wasn’t half bad; but notice how the more users it gets the less you hear about it?) And P2P is great for file transfer since there are no latency/buffer issues. Just don’t expect it to be the answer to video delivery for consumers. Conversations with executives at the likes of Akamai (who has their own P2P technology) have confirmed peer streaming will likely be limited to private networks where there’s greater control over the protocols and the bandwidth.
Don’t get me started on streaming vs. download, and why the latter is better because storage is cheaper than bandwidth. That’s a subject for another post.
4 comments March 14, 2008
