Tooling Around: Gary Crocke On CacheLogic's Velocix CDN

For the next part in Gamasutra’s ‘Tooling Around’ feature, which profiles and interviews middleware and tools developers about their products, today’s interview is with Gary Crocke from CacheLogic about its Velocix peer-assisted content delivery network. Velocix is the flagship CDN for CacheLogic and provides a “a global footprint of fixed infrastructure” with “all the guarantees, operational support, and content management one would expect”. The system is optimized for the delivery of multi-gigabyte files, and provides a cost effective way of distributing content, allowing users to control the speed and delivery method of content, providing the choice to use, for example, slower speeds for older demos and a higher speed for critical patches. We spoke to Crocke recently, and asked about CacheLogic and Velocix, and its benefits for online distribution. When and why was CacheLogic formed and what were the goals of the company at the time? CacheLogic was founded in 2002. The company sold P2P caching devices to Internet service providers to help them manage the impact of P2P on their networks. CacheLogic is a global provider of Content Delivery Network services. With its flexible delivery services, CacheLogic has revolutionized both the "mechanics" and economics of content delivery, enabling the Internet to become the preferred delivery mechanism for large digital media assets. How did you realise the need for a product like Velocix? In early 2006, we saw the global demand increase for large digital media assets delivered over the Internet and realized the strain this growth was placing on existing delivery mechanisms. We'd built the new service to evolve CDN business models and technology to cope with online delivery of large digital media assets. What was the development time on the product, and what challenges did you run into in preparing the product for industry use? We started developing the service and rolling out the network early in 2006. Early in 2007 we started to sell CDN services. The main challenges were to build and deploy the global network and the asset-based traffic management and reporting software that goes along with that. How has the product developed over the time you've been producing it? We've expanded the network into three main geographies (North America, Europe, Asia) and introduced new configurable Class of Service capabilities to the CDN industry, including unique asset delivery, pricing, billing and reporting. How have you acted on feedback to improve the product? We are extremely committed to our customers and have allowed them to participate in defining the evolution of the service offering. This feedback is evident in the high level feature set. VelociX is designed for delivery of large digital media assets. VelociX is built from the ground-up with unique asset-based traffic management capabilities to meet the performance demands of large digital content. The network provides content owners with a seamless, end-to-end managed service for the publication and high-speed delivery of large digital media to mass audiences. Was cost effectiveness always a major focus throughout the development of Velocix? We've really focused on differentiating ourselves in the CDN space with new and exciting features that enable our customers to differentiate their online offerings. Part of this includes features to enable overall cost reduction for our customers. What are some of the more notable examples of the product's use? We have customers today in the gaming, video and software spaces. The ideal application is for large digital asset delivery - especially the high performance and low cost delivery of games, patches and updates. Rather than having a flat price and performance for all traffic, VelociX lets you assign a delivery speed and cost to each asset - so assets requiring high performance can get it, and assets requiring low cost delivery can get it, all with the same solution. This allows you to save on the total cost of content delivery while ensuring in-demand assets get the performance they need. With VelociX, you can reduce your content delivery costs by 25 to 80%. VelociX has fine-grained asset-based reporting where exact costs and revenue for each asset is known. This enables you to understand the real asset delivery costs with a simple billing and delivery model and relates business and delivery costs to top line revenue via simple reporting tools. This facility to let you to create accurate charge-back models to business units for actual usage is also a critical component. Who is currently using the product? I can't reveal specifics here, but look for notable customer announcements throughout the summer. What do you see as the next evolution of Velocix? Our vision is to move content delivery from a cost center to a profit center - enabling new revenue opportunities for our customers by using CDN services. In the coming months, we'll be evolving the service to align with this vision.