G-Core, a leading Luxembourg-based CDN company, has just acquired Skypark CDN, a Russian pure-play CDN. The acquisition will likely buttress G-Core’s already towering reputation as a global web service provider. We’ve written about Skypark before, and they’ve done some interesting research on Russian web and gaming activity. With the merger, G-Core is clearly trying to further strengthen their CDN service and branch out into various markets.
In the last few years, G-Core has teamed with a number of Russian companies to move into the massive online gaming market. In collaboration with Wargaming and Mirantis, two giants in the gaming industry, G-Core set a record for the highest number of peak concurrent users in a CIS game server: 1,140,000. Eventually, G-Core worked with Wargaming to move its service infrastructure to the cloud. They used open source software developed by Mirantis and over time transitioned their physical infrastructure entirely to the cloud.
Skypark, meanwhile, has been growing in the CIS CDN market for years. A profile we wrote a couple years back noted the increasing popularity of local CDNs in the CIS region over traditional European companies. The huge Russian market gave Skypark a great starting point for their CDN infrastructure. Major cities around Russia were good locations for proxy servers and data centers. Skypark used its local expertise to outpace global CDNs, like Akamai, that also had a foothold in Russia.
Now that G-Core has acquired Skypark, we can likely expect an impressive showing in various CDN markets. G-Core has over time moved into different markets, and often finds its highest concentration of users in gaming. The combined network and technological power of Skypark and G-Core might be a watershed for the Russian and perhaps even European cloud CDN models.
High-powered CDN models are essential for a growing number of popular markets, like gaming and video streaming. These platforms require extremely high bandwidth loads. They also work in tandem. Much of the gaming market online is actually concentrated in live streaming and video more generally. Some of the most demanding activities run by CDNs are often the most popular.
G-Core is also moving aggressively into the global CDN market. They’ve recently built network nodes in Israel, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Sydney, Milan, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Further plans for nodes include Dubai, St. Petersburg, and Toronto PoPs.
G-Core hopes that the merger will foreshadow their ultimate goal: to “become one of the world’s top five CDNs in 2018.” We’ll have to wait and see, but this meeting of minds might just be what they need to break that ceiling.