Deep Dive: Aryaka Networks

Aryaka Networks, the leading provider of WAN as-a-service is on to something big. They’ve signed up hundreds of customers, and are growing rapidly, to the tune 416% in 2013. Critics might argue that it’s easy to accomplish spectacular growth when annual revenues are in the single digits; but then again, according to some estimates, the WAN market is somewhere between $80B to $120B, and the CDN market is between $5B to $7B. It’s possible Aryaka may hit the same growth rate when revenues are in the $100M range.

Aryaka is in a great position to capture market share in the WAN and CDN market, due to their innovative technology stack. Their technology is ages ahead of the WAN Optimization Appliances of Riverbed, Citrix & F5. With Riverbed, you buy hardware, place them in all the branch locations, and the appliance optimizes the content on its way out to the Internet. Once the packet leaves the branch location, Riverbed has zero packet visibility in the middle mile. Aryaka on the other hand, has complete packet visibility in the middle mile; plus it can manipulate the routes the packets take in the middle mile; that’s the kind of control you get with CDN infrastructure and peering.

B2B CDN Running Over VPN

Aryaka offers WAN Optimization as-a-service, Application Delivery as-a-service, Network as-a-service, and Cloud Network as-a-service. All the services basically do the same thing, which is deliver content between branch locations for each customer, over a private network running IPsec/VPN, that works well across long distances; and provides Internet access to branch locations, that need access to cloud applications like Salesforce.

Aryaka is a B2B CDN not a B2C CDN. The B2B CDN is responsible for content uploads and downloads. The platform for content uploads is just as complex as developing the CDN platform. Aryaka created its own content upload exchange platform from scratch, that runs on some flavor of multipath TCP, as opposed to UDP.

Aryaka is similar to the Signiant B2B content exchange platform, with the exception that Signiant is a non-VPN based solution, addressed strictly to the file exchange of uncompressed video files. Signiant sits in front of the firewall, and Aryaka behind it. This leads to the question? Is Aryaka going to expand horizontally into B2B video file transfer business, giving Signiant and Aframe a run for their money? Nah, I don’t think so, but it would be cool.

Scroll to Top