Akamai debuts private CDNs with Starbucks and Apple

"We already deliver all the iTunes content [for Apple], so now we're extending that into Starbucks stores, said Chris Schoettle, executive VP of technology and networks at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based content delivery network (CDN). The service will be enabled by what the company calls "Akamai-enabled servers," which are regular Starbucks servers running Akamai software and dedicated exclusively to the iTunes content. It debuts in the US, where some 900 Starbucks outlets in New York, San Francisco and other cities are already fitted with these servers and ready to start offering the service. This represents something of a departure for Akamai, which normally delivers its customers' content by putting boxes into ISPs and optimising what it calls the "middle mile" of the public internet. It has already broken with tradition of late, with the launch of its IP Acceleration service, which for the first time sees Akamai-branded boxes on customer premises to address the requirements of apps that run over the public internet without being browser-based, such as Citrix or FTP. Now the company is going to be on-premise for Starbucks but on the coffee shop's hardware, communicating with users' laptops over the in-store T-Mobile hotspot. Schoettle emphasized, however, that in both cases the CDN provider remains outside the customer's firewall and on the public internet, a business model he said would continue for the immediate future. "Could behind-the-firewall be an adjacent market for us in a few years' time?" he mused. "Possibly, but right now there's so much happening over the public internet that we don't need to. A lot of enterprise apps are moving outside the firewall." What the Starbucks deal does introduce, meanwhile, is the concept of "private CDN" deployments for specific customers, of which Schoettle said several others are in the pipeline. "This is an adjacent market Akamai is moving into," he went on. "Once a company has decided to go outside the firewall with an SSL or IPsec VPN, or using the Citrix protocol, that's our sweet spot." Our View The deal with Starbucks and Apple is something of a no-brainer for Akamai, in that it already works for the latter delivering iTunes, so it's just an extension of the service into Starbucks outlets. However, it will be interesting to see whether coffee shop mogul expands the service further, for instance into the video content Apple is already promoting as the next stage of its content provision business. Beyond that, one could even imagine Starbucks wanting to enable its business users to access their enterprise apps in an optimised fashion, putting Akamai's IP Acceleration software on its servers as well as the Web Acceleration technology underpinning the iTunes service.