Akamai goes P2P, buys Red Swoosh
CROSS POSTED FROM GIGAOM: Akamai has just announced that it is buying Red Swoosh, a peer-to-peer based service, for about $15 million in stock. That’s not that much for a start-up that counts some heavyweights as its customers.
The rumors of this deal had been floating around for about two months and Travis Kalanick of Red Swoosh has been avoiding us for a while now, ever since we asked him about the deal. Anyway, the deal should make Akamai naysayers pause a little. Many had said that P2P caching could dislodge Akamai from its current dominant position. Fat chance – Akamai, it is clear, is more fierce in protecting its turf than say Microsoft. It just uses its hefty stock market capitalization to buy out possible competitors.
I will post more later today once I get through the email hell!
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This news tends to prove that even giants like Akamai with strong CDN networks cannot compete against p2p delivery networks. So if you cannot beat them, join (buy…) them !
To another extent, this news is very good and confirm the efforts from my company to evangelize P2P since the very beginning and provide P2P Content Delivery solutions: peer-to-peer is now seriously considered as the main architecture when companies develop their online video distribution portal, while client-servers architecture are deprecated.
And of course it is not limited to video contents: you can use p2p content delivery networks for music, pictures, work documents, zip archives, programs …
Sebastien
http://www.1-click.com
Agreed on the deal: a pretty good price for Akamai given that Travis has got some good tech and established clients already.
During all of the news coverage of Akamai’s acquisition of Red Swoosh, I see references to Red Swoosh’s customers similar to Om’s “heavyweights as its customers” but no references to specific customers. Who are these ‘heavyweights’?
Thanks -