It looks like Imperva plans on letting Incapsula run as an independent entity for the time being. I think its a good move, just like Verizon’s decision on letting EdgeCast operate independently for now. Why ruin a good thing, especially when the startup is gaining traction in the marketplace, and growing their customer base. Also, Incapsula is an ongoing case study for many of us in the industry, because it’s a different type of CDN, something that we’re not accustomed to seeing. Yottaa and Fastly are a CDN through-and-through, and you notice that immediately when coming across their value prop. However, it takes a little longer figuring out what Incapsula does.
The big question for Incapsula, should they lead with their security offering or CDN services? I still believe they should lead with their CDN, and offer their security products as a feature set of their CDN. On a positive note, Incapsula continues to add more features to their platform, with a new one called “Content and Network Optimization”, which is a type of FEO and DSA. Here is the deal when it comes to the CDN ecosystem, when a company creates a robust feature like DSA, FEO, DNS, or whatever, don’t bury it under vast amounts of information; productize it, create brochures around it, develop a story around it, and train the sale staff on how to pitch it. CDNs work hard to create individual features, it only makes sense that they advertise it on a grand scale.