RE: Market-leader absence in standards (Was: RE: Network World: IMPPlosion)

Date view Thread view Subject view Author view

From: Mark Day (markday@cisco.com)
Date: Thu Dec 21 2000 - 09:20:18 PST


> [last note] I just attended a BOF at the IETF which was about content
> distribution: the business that Akamai and Inktomi are in. I
> wondered if it
> was a similar situation -- isn't Akamai the market leader in
> taking people's
> sites and caching them all at the edges of the network? Well, I
> didn't see
> them in the WG (though they might well have been in the room, they weren't
> authoring the drafts).

Hmmm. I agreed with most of your argument but there seems to be a type
mismatch in this summary note, since Akamai and Inktomi have different
business models. Akamai is a service provider, Inktomi sells software.
It's more reasonable to talk about Akamai and Digital Island as being in the
content distribution (service) business; both Cisco and Inktomi are in the
content distribution (technology) business, and sell to services like Akamai
and Digital Island.

Anyway, Avi Freedman of Akamai was in the room, as was Dave Farber of
Digital Island and Brad Cain of Mirror Image. Those are 3 well-known content
distribution service providers. In addition, Fred Douglis and Oliver
Spatscheck were there from AT&T (a leading service provider if not yet well
known in content distribution). There may well have been other people in the
room (who I didn't recognize) from other service providers.

It is true that no-one from Akamai or DI submitted a draft (in line with
your analysis about market leaders). But otherwise, we had a pretty solid
collection of cooperating parties. I was chairing the meeting (and work for
Cisco). The main presentation was joint work between myself, Phil Rzewski of
Inktomi, and Gary Tomlinson of Entera (now CacheFlow) and was jointly
presented by Phil and Gary.

The various drafts had authors from Cisco, Entera, Inktomi, Exodus, Mirror
Image, AT&T, Lucent, TransNexus, ActiVia, and Apogee Networks. Other
companies represented on the design team (with acknowledged contributions to
the drafts) included Novell and Network Appliance.

--Mark


Date view Thread view Subject view Author view

This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Dec 21 2000 - 09:22:37 PST