More on the Bell Canada Relationship

Earlier this month Limelight Networks announced a deal with Bell in Canada to provide CDN services to the telco’s business customers. It’s a model that’s similar to the Limelight Networks partnership with Global Crossing, and representative of a trend we’re seeing among telecom companies looking to expand their traditional services. Here to provide more details is Adam Wray, Vice President, Channels and Alliances.

The new partnership with Bell is more than just a typical reseller deal. Because we operate an optical network just like Bell does, we can combine our delivery assets with their core network to integrate deeply with their existing broadband delivery services. This means a lot of joint effort between our two companies, but the upfront labor investment has big advantages. For Bell, we feed their highest revenue businesses. By being able to offer increased throughput and server availability, Bell can sell higher-value services to more customers. Bell also has access to the entire Limelight Networks ecosystem for related applications including content hosting, ad insertion, and performance monitoring, among many others. For us at Limelight Networks, the close integration with Bell gives us massive reach throughout Canada (Bell is the largest telco provider in the country), and greater insight into the Internet traffic patterns of Canadian broadband users. More visibility into the network lets us continue to refine and improve our delivery model.

We’ve found that telcos increasingly want strong CDN capabilities, but it’s a business that’s not core for them. It requires a great deal of capital and technical expertise, and for that reason, the CDN partnership model has growing support. Business customers find the CDN add-on appealing as well. Bell has already talked about signing multiple deals during the go-to-market period, including Astral Media, which is Canada’s largest broadcast of English and French-language pay and specialty TV services. The response has been incredible, and we’re just getting started.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Content Delivery Network. 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.