Verizon's Edgecast strategy emerges

Working for a Fortune 500 company has done nothing to dampen the entrepreneurial spirit of Edgecast founders James Segil and Alex Kazerani. The two partners, who jointly won Ernst & Young’s 2014 Entrepreneur of the Year award for the greater Los Angeles region, have been in a major expansion mode since Verizon Communications acquired their company seven months ago. Segil says Verizon has made significant investments in the Edgecast content delivery network, often leveraging the IT infrastructure, data centers and security expertise that came to Verizon via its 2011 Terremark acquisition.
“They can drop a huge amount of infrastructure,” said Segil, and apparently that’s just what Verizon has done, adding 20 new points of presence worldwide and doubling the egress capacity of the Edgecast content delivery network.
Edgecast handles content delivery for Twitter, Hulu, Pinterest, Sony Mobile and now for all the Verizon digital media properties as well. The eight-year-old company, now part of Verizon Digital Media, focuses on “fat pipes” that connect to all wireless providers and specializes in video optimization software. Verizon noted at the time of the acquisition that the two companies shared “a common architectural approach to video-optimized networks.”
“Verizon’s acquisition of Edgecast was very much evidence that carriers are focusing on optimization of content delivery,” said Sue Rudd, director of service provider analysis at Strategy Analytics. That optimization requires state-of-the-art software and billions of dollars worth of infrastructure.
Brazil is a perfect example. “Our customers have been champing at the bit for access to this market,” said Segil. But he notes that there are still many challenges in South America’s most populous country, where a large portion of IP traffic is still routed through Miami. Segil said digital content that only needs to travel a few miles between Brazilian ISPs often goes all the way to Miami and back.
“For us, to be able to put a [point of presence] locally and be able to establish connections locally with all the ISPs in a market gives the users a much better experience than they get today,” said Segil.
Security in the cloud
Kazerani and Segil have been busy on the software front as well. This month Verizon Digital Media Services launched a beta version of a cloud-based Web application firewall. Segil said that as cyber attacks become more diffuse, the counter measures also need to be more distributed.
“No matter where the attack comes from you can mitigate it from where it starts, defend it at scale, so that as it’s attacking you, your site doesn’t go down because the CDN which hosts the firewall can handle millions if not billions of inbound simultaneous attacks and scale,” said Segial. “If you had just one box, your firewall box, sitting in a data center, and somebody did a big volumetric attack, it would saturate the pipe going in to your data center, it would take down that firewall box and leave it ineffective. So having that distributed capacity in the cloud with a CDN gives you a unique defensive capability to handle any kind of volumetric attack.”
Segil added that Verizon’s solution can respond to attacks more quickly than other cloud-based solutions, allowing operators to reconfigure the network in less than five minutes to defend against an attack.
Streamlined e-commerce
E-commerce is a priority for many Edgecast customers and the company has focused recent development efforts here. Segil said that when sites load slowly, third-party applications are often to blame. With this in mind, Edgecast has developed an integrated infrastructure solution.
“We give the e-commerce website an ability to speed up the whole page load and take into account that all these little third-party apps are going to be there and they can prioritize the page load,” said Segil. He said most vendors want to deliver the shopping cart and images first, and then load analytics, tracking and ads.
“They can still do all the cutting-edge stuff that they want to with all these third parties, but they don’t have to worry about any of that slowing down the end user experience,” said Segil.
Slowing down does not seem to be on Segil’s agenda either. He is now chief marketing officer of Verizon Digital Media Services, and his partner Alex Kazerani is CTO. “We are leaning in to really grow this business,” said Segil. “There is an expectation that all our customers have now, that scale is not going to be an issue.”
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