We’re publishing our first industry report after a three-year hiatus. The report explores three industry-impacting trends of the last decade, two of which are still in play.
The fate of the CDN industry and AWS are intertwined, the yin and the yang, if you will. The future state of the CDN sector depends on how AWS evolves, does, or doesn’t do. Therefore, to predict the future of the CDN industry, we’ll need to predict how the AWS business model will evolve in the next few years. That shouldn’t be too difficult since there are plenty of market indicators describing the transformation of AWS.
The first section of the report is described below. For the free report, scroll to the bottom and download.
Industry Highlights
- CDN industry continues to be in a constant state of change
- Some incumbents are pivoting their business models, made possible by recent acquisitions
- New startups are introducing new approaches to delivering content, apps, web services, microservices, APIs, containers, and media
- Competition is intensifying as the number of startups targeting developers increases
- AWS, Azure, and GCP (“hyperscalers”) are investing billions in edge capabilities
- Three industry-impacting trends of the last decade are described below.
Overview
The CDN industry has been in constant transition for the last few years. Identifying key trends is challenging because of the overwhelming market noise. In addition, numerous newly minted startups are bringing disruptive business models to the developer market, intensifying an already competitive sector.
Recent vendor activities:
- Industry leaders Akamai and Edgio have made game-changing acquisitions that they are using to pivot their business models in a new direction. Akamai is building out its cloud capabilities and Edgio, its developer platform.
- Cloudflare continues to exceed expectations from an earnings perspective due to an industry-best hybrid sales model and product development machine. Recently, leadership has stated that the company can reach $5B in five years with its current product portfolio.
- Fastly has hired technology veterans in the C Suite to revitalize growth. Although the company grew Q3 2020 revenue by 25% YOY, it only added 31 new customers in that period.
- Startups like Netlify, Fly.io, and Render have introduced new business models that excel in serving the developer community.
- Startups are vital to the CDN industry because they bring a fresh perspective to solving problems with new approaches and innovative technology stacks.
- CDNs are not alone at the edge. AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft are investing billions in edge capabilities.
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