Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

by Tony Greenberg

A friend of mine in the research industry used to give out little post-it-notes to trainee analysts that said “be wrong boldly.” Her reasoning – if you are bold and right, you will be hailed as a prophet. If you’re wrong, most likely the crowd will have moved on by the time your prediction fizzles. But accountability for our past advice is a core value here at RampRate, so we have to see how we did on our 2011 predictions – and see just how well our crystal ball was working. By our count, we have 4 hits, 2 partial hits, 1 miss, and 3 TBDs that won’t be known until later. What do you think?

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Last week Google formally launched its Page Speed Service, the latest in a long line of Content Delivery Network (CDN) services from dozens of vendors from big and small to hit the market over the last 15 years. In the case of Google though, I see a few novel changes that could not only materially affect but outright wreck the marketplace for CDN.

Google has offered free CDN services for video, via YouTube and Google Video, for many years now. Although we take YouTube for granted these days, it wasn’t too long ago that posting video on the internet required a lot of time, focus, and money. Life was very complicated before one could shoot a video on a smartphone and automatically upload it to YouTube. A videographer with a high quality camera would have to be hired, the resulting tape would have to be digitized, edited, and encoded (and potentially transcoded into one or more specific proprietary formats), and a streaming video hosting company would have to be found, negotiated with, and a lawyer engaged to review a contract. YouTube and smart phones have cleaned up that mess and made a single elegant process- but it only applies to video.

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Who’s in the buggy whip business in technology these days? By that, I mean, what companies are about to become obsolete thanks to major shifts in media delivery and consumption caused by the rise, the serious rise, of streaming?

More than a dozen years after the launch of the Streaming Media conference, which is now filled with dozens of content-management systems and practically no CDNs (content distribution networks), the show is creeping back to success showing its best growth numbers in years. Meanwhile, the CDN business is still a rug-dealer’s market, facing a death spiral toward $0 bandwidth, with individual vendors providing widely varying price, quality and value. “We’ve seen this all before,” observes Steve Lerner, RampRate’s Media Technology Specialist, “by 2003 there were over 25 dead CDNs all who followed the same pattern of selling ‘cheaper’ rather than selling ‘better’. It is hard to make a living marking up bandwidth that has a continuously collapsing marginal cost.” Thankfully, there’s still a market, as my firm, RampRate, mediates deals in this space).

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Driving in Detroit’s Rut, is the Media Business Next?

By Tony Greenberg /Alex Veytsel

Media firms have been my clients for years. Most IT firms complain that media firms prey on IT services firms by offering to “reference them” for larger enterprise deals. WRONG. Media firms, much like adult entertainment firms, are the spaghetti slingers and early adopters of new tech. You have to love them for taking the arrows in their backs and mounting themselves on the fireplace altar as trophies.

Media firms are actually IT Heroes. While banks and automakers wax poetic about risk and return on investment, Disney, ABC, News Corp., Viacom, CBS, and Sony–all past or current clients–pave the yellow brick road. Hats off to you all for “boldly going where no man has gone before”. For now, let’s ponder what lessons we can learn from the carnage of auto and the future demise of IT. (more…)

Posted in Data Center & Colocation, IT Market, Managed Services, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Will users force the door open on the walled gardens of private Internets?

By Alex Veytsel and Tony Greenberg

In the hubbub over the Google and Verizon new net neutrality plan, a couple of things stand out:

1) There is no actual deal, just a proposed compromise that no one actually likes

2) Everyone seems to be confused about the new,  private Internet

While more viable than its critics suppose, this solution will implode in a wave of mistrust. Even if implemented, there is no equilibrium state possible between the public and private Internet. That’s because the new private Internet is not new – it’s what used to be called a walled garden.

When there is a free and open alternative (think AOL versus a typical modern ISP), the garden eventually withers as every able-minded user scrambles over the wall. When there is no alternative (think iPhone’s app store), it’s a monopolistic cash cow. Either way, sustained equilibrium between the two is rarely achieved. Each side is likely counting on the loss of that balance betting on their own models of the wall between private and public. And that gets us back to the wave of mistrust that will sink this ship before it leaves harbor.

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Posted in CDN & Streaming, Cloud Computing, Content & Content Devices, Network & Bandwidth, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »