About our channel reseller relationships

Reseller relationships with CDN companies can be like singing in public – everyone wants to try, but only a select few actually do it well. It’s with this in mind that we re-launched our efforts to build out our alliance and channel reseller ecosystem earlier this year, under the direction of Vice President, Adam Wray. Since there have been many rumors about our program, we sat down with Adam for a quick chat to set the record straight.

What is Limelight Networks’ reseller strategy?
Wray: Our reseller strategy helps give our business focus, while also helping us rapidly extend our scale and reach. There are some things Limelight does really well – like being a world-class content delivery platform. We focus 100% of our efforts on innovation in the CDN space, whether that’s faster delivery, advanced storage or reporting capabilities or providing technical guidance through our Professional Services team.

Limelight has always been about an “open ecosystem.” What that means is that we have built open interfaces into our network-based platform, so that other companies can extend its functionality. These interfaces enable customers to take a best-of-breed approach for their business needs.  They can leverage our robust, globally-distributed CDN and then pick and choose the other vendors they want to work with to complete their unique delivery chain. Today we have over 130 members of our ecosystem that have integrated their services onto our platform. Customers can integrate home-grown or custom solutions by taking advantage of those open programming interfaces, too.

Our reseller strategy takes that open approach to the next level. There are many opportunities for us to align with companies that provide complimentary offerings to our own, where our services will be adjunct to theirs and provide a differentiated solution to the market. For Limelight, we believe we can leverage the scale and reach of select partners to rapidly enter new markets (like the enterprise or public sectors), increase the adoption of our core services, grow our customer base, provide end-to-end solutions to the marketplace and accelerate revenue and time to market.

What are the criteria for becoming a reseller?
Wray: First, to be clear, resellers are defined as companies looking to provide our services as a standalone offering or as part of a suite of standalone offerings to “legal entities.” They may have a bundle of services that they slide a Limelight-branded service into, or they may “white-label” a Limelight service as their own.

Next, we’ve been in the CDN industry a long time to know two things: 1) everyone wants to resell everyone else, and 2) reseller programs are difficult to manage successfully. A few years ago, it seemed that CDNs were taking a “spaghetti against the wall” approach to reseller relationships, where vendors signed up every reseller they could find, and then were spread too thin to make any one of those relationships actually work for the customer. It gave CDNs a bad reputation in this regard.

We intend to only enter into reseller relationships with companies that are willing to truly commit to making them work. What I mean by that is we believe the right way to manage our reseller program is to invest our time, energy, and resources into a small number of relationships, so that we can drive them successfully and really provide something differentiated to the end customer. So, I would characterize our approach to this program as “selective.”

We look to work with companies willing to make that significant commitment to us and to making the program successful. We don’t want just a handshake agreement – we want to enter committed, contractual agreements that clearly define dedicated resources, people, goals, and even the length of the relationship. If both sides aren’t willing to make that type of commitment, the partnership will not be successful and the customer will suffer.

What do resellers get from working with Limelight?
Wray: First, if they are looking to resell CDN services, its probably because they don’t offer them today, and they have realized that its hard to do what we do, and expensive to build out the infrastructure we have.

Second, when you work with us, you aren’t working with a startup fighting to stay in business in tough economic times, or a smaller company spreading its resources too thin or giving away its IP by doing reseller deals with every large name that wants to dance. Limelight has the second-largest market share amongst CDN providers – over 25% in the video CDN market along according to Frost & Sullivan’s latest report - and do business with over 1300 rich media and enterprise customers. We have eight years of experience in successfully delivering many of the largest live and on-demand events in the history of the Internet. We offer a full suite for rich media, site delivery, e-commerce transactions, storage, and hosting, and support all of the major formats (like Flash or Silverlight or Move to name a few).

I’ve already mentioned our open partner ecosystem.  We believe it is a differentiated approach for us in the marketplace compared to other established players, but what else is quickly becoming a differentiator is our Professional Services organization , which can handle customer integrations, along with advice on distribution strategies, architecture design, storage infrastructure, live event execution, and best practices for format/player selection.

Finally, our global network is unmatched in its ability to scale and delivery high-quality, reliable services. It has over 2.5 Tbps of capacity - that’s 3+ Nielson ratings points of audience - and its still growing. Over 85% of the time, we deliver content from our network to the last mile, without it ever touching the public Internet. We have over 900 of those last mile access network connections and growing, meaning our platform can provide a reseller with carrier-neutral access to millions of global end-users  This took us over seven years to get to critical mass based upon our relationships and strategic value with network providers, and will continue to be a difference maker in high-quality delivery as content and library sizes increase.

Address the rumor: Is Global Crossing reselling Limelight Networks?
Wray: Yes, I can confirm that rumor. And we are thrilled to have them as part of the authorized reseller program. We’ve had a longstanding relationship with Global Crossing and think that our new arrangement will provide great value and differentiation to both their customers as well as ours.

Thanks, Adam.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 9:50 am and is filed under Content Delivery Network, Customer Testimonials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.