OnApp, based in London, was founded in July 2010. They received $20M in VC funding, have about 120 employees, and more than 800 clients in 87 countries. OnApp offers an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform for Telcos, Hosting Companies, & MSPs. The platform offers three services: cloud compute, cloud storage, and CDN.
OnApp has grown fast in a short period of time. They understand the market well, and have a unique product offering. Telco’s and Hosting companies now have another option besides License CDN or White Label Reseller. The License CDN product is offered by Akamai, EdgeCast & Limelight. All three have big Telco customers using their License CDN product. The License CDN product is more robust, scalable, and feature rich than OnApp, but it is also more expensive. License CDN and OnApp appeal to different market segments.
License CDN is a good fit for big Telco’s like Telefonica, Telmex, AT&T, or NT&T. OnApp is a good fit for hosting companies. For smaller Telco’s, they can go either way. The OnApp product enables hosting companies to extend their feature set, right out of the box. OnApp is almost plug-and-play compared to License CDN. Hosting companies can be up and running in days, for the cost of a few thousand dollars per month, on a limited roll-out.
For the large hosting companies like SoftLayer or Rackspace, their better off with the White Label Reseller option from EdgeCast, Akamai or Limelight. These CDNs offer a more robust product offering that enables hosting companies to provide advanced features like FEO, ADN, instant purging, raw log files, and advanced analytics.
The biggest benefit of OnApp, it enables single site hosting companies to be a part of a large CDN federation, where thousands of single site hosting companies come together, to offer a global CDN. It’s power in numbers. That means any single site hosting company using OnApp may proclaim itself a global CDN with thousands of POPs and hundreds of thousands of servers.