BitGravity enters Indian CDN space

BANGALORE, INDIA: The growing Indian content delivery network (CDN) market, touted to be Rs.1, 163 crore by 2010, is paving way for new players into the CDN service space.

A recent entrant is BitGravity, a next-generation CDN for interactive broadcasting.

On the backdrop of its recent tie-up with Tata Communications, Perry Wu, CEO and co-founder, BitGravity shares a few words with CIOL in an interview. Excerpts:

CIOL: Please brief us on BitGravity-Tata Communications tie-up?

Perry Wu: BitGravity and Tata Communications have a strategic global partnership, which was announced in March of 2008. On September 8 we announced together the global launch of Tata Communications CDN powered by BitGravity, which is the first truly global CDN on a single asynchronous number (ASN) IP network covering Europe, Asia, India and North America.

Tata also announced an $11.5 million investment in convertible debt validating the company's CDN platform as a key benefit in Tata Communications value- added services offering and John Hayduck, CTO of Tata Communications, has also joined the BitGravity Board.

CIOL: How do you evaluate this tie-up?

PU: Asia is a very important market for BitGravity and was a key motivator for BitGravity in partnering with a strong company like Tata.

Tata Communications is uniquely positioned and its Tier 1 IP presence worldwide will help us to offer quality global delivery and support, which enables companies to outsource distribution of video, downloads, music, games and multimedia without degradation from Paris to Hong Kong, Bangalore and the Silicon Valley.

Tata Communications' extensive relationships within and outside of the communications industry will accelerate the deployment and penetration of our innovative platform.

CIOL: Can you brief upon the technology that you make use of?

PU: At the heart of BitGravity's architecture is the world's first distributed origin-based  content delivery platform. Our platform eliminates the need for caching, which reduces the number of lengthy look-ups for content. Upon this architecture, we have layered a patent-pending routing protocol and set of technologies called BitCast.

BitCast saves time by eliminating the need for latent DNS geo-location requests. Together, these technologies deliver rich, interactive, and real-time media with the highest through-put and fastest response times available on the market. Additionally, there are no single points of failure, ensuring that your content is available to all users all of the time.

CIOL:  How is BitGravity's platform different from that of other CDN providers'?

PU: BitGravity's CDN platform was built from the ground up to address video traffic and is a distributed origin-based content delivery platform, designed to deliver real-time and interactive, rich media, which is problematic for current caching proxy CDNs.

Unlike traditional CDNs, which utilise off-the-shelf hardware and modified enterprise software, BitGravity's platform is the first system architected end-to-end to deliver carrier-class WAN services. This means integration with Tier1 carrier networks like Tata Communications and innovation in routing, systems and applications.

CIOL: What are the major restraints and industry challenges, specific to the video delivery and streaming industry?

PU: Proxy cache networks worked well for what they were designed for in the late 1990s. Today, however, the media driving Internet experiences has changed from small images to large video files, and caching proxy networks present significant drawbacks for companies and organisations that want to affordably provide fast-performing and reliable high-fidelity, interactive experiences with streaming video, live broadcasting, and interactive applications.  

CIOL: How will the lack of Internet penetration affect the scenario?

PU: We are aware that Internet penetration is very low in India but we certainly expect broadband and Internet penetration to increase.

CIOL: Recently, Reliance Globalcom tied up with Internap Network Services. How tough is the competition for this space?

PU: We haven't ever seen Reliance and rarely see Internap. Our offerings are differentiated and include HD and live delivery. So, the competition in our space is much more focused.