ChannelLife New Zealand - Industry insider news for technology resellers
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Tue, 1st Nov 2011
FYI, this story is more than a year old

New Zealand resellers will be able to white label AT&T’s new cloud-based Content Delivery Network (CDN) platform sometime next year.AT&T launched CDN globally earlier this year, saying the offering would ensure ‘lightning like fast delivery of digital content, such as videos and graphics, efficiently and at low cost’.Sam Farraj, AT&T’s associate vice president of Digital Media, says the CDN offering is ‘about the need for speed’.The platform became generally available in late October. Farraj says it will be opened up to resellers sometime next year, allowing Kiwi resellers to white label the product. "From a partner standpoint, they can use it either as part of a solution where they have an application and bundle it with CDN or be in CDN reselling,” he says."Companies are continuing to go global and have a mobile workforce. From the CDN perspective, this allows applications like SAP, Sharepoint, even email and the CEO’s town hall broadcast to move off campus.” He says while some technologies focus on optimising the data for the device being used, CDN optimises based not just on device but on the network connection. "From the New Zealand perspective, we can have someone who has to fill out time sheets, or check x-rays – and it all gets through to their iPad, Blackberry or whatever device, with graphics good enough for the device and within the six second timeframe. He says clients’ high level metrics are for broadband downloads within four seconds and mobile within 6.5 seconds. "If users can’t complete the download in that period, 25% of the user base will abandon the connection."This allows companies to deliver their website, with rich content to that metric, regardless of where in the globe they are.Farraj says the offering gives companies a global reach, without having to build out on a global scale."The Cloudlet technology [part of AT&T’s Content Acceleration suite] allows us to make content which can’t normally be cached, cacheable so businesses can get it closer to the end user."Companies can offload content via CDN and reduce the load back to the data center, but more importantly in addition to the cost savings, it provides a better end-user experience.”