Rackspace Teams With Akamai; Could Be Good 新闻 for Limelight
上周, Rackspace announced that it was partnering with Akamai for web acceleration and cloud optimization, and some well-placed pundit commentary suggested that it would be at the expense of Rackspace's relationship with Limelight.
On Friday morning I noticed that Limelight's shares had dipped a little while all the other tech stocks I track had risen. I couldn't immediately see why and had assumed it was just one of those unexplainable fluctuations that so often happens.
At lunch, however, a colleague asked me if i had seen the Rackspace/Akamai news. He and I are working on a large multi-cloud/multi-CDN virtualization project, and this news-which I hadn't yet seen-had some direct bearing on our planning.
After lunch I hit the search engines and also scanned my email. 作为Akamai和Rackspace的客户, I expected the news feeds to reveal something about this news, Rackspace确实做了一个 公告 证实了我同事所说的.
Now its no news to readers of this site that cloud infrastructures form partnerships with CDNs. However Rackspace has, in my mind done, something very strange here: There are a number of 报告 quoting "sources at Rackspace" that claim that the relationship between Rackspace and Limelight (that has existed for several years) will be "phased out over time."
在今天的市场上, and from the perspective of a relatively experienced implementor of both CDN and cloud infrastructures (particularly with regard to streaming media deployments), I think this posturing of leaving one partner to run into the hills with another is actually negative for Rackspace. Now I have to add that I can actually find little to show that the claims to "phase out" the Limelight relationship are actually a verifiable strategy of Rackspace's, 所以在我发表下一个声明之前，我想强调这一点. If it is indeed the case then It implies that they are moving away from a multi-vendor resilience strategy to wholly embrace a single relationship with Akamai. In my mind that is like throwing the parachutes out of the airplane: You would have to have a 真的 这是一个很好的理由, since it would in nearly every conceivable situation make absolutely no sense at all.
It implies to me that there is some larger deal-making at stake going on behind the scenes.
I also notice that a lot of the 报告 mention the volumetrics of servers managed by both Rackspace and by Akamai-"one runs X may tens of thousands of servers, 另一个跑Y多个,”等.
Frankly, I am tired of hearing Akamai sustain its market proposition simply by sheer brawn. 在今天的虚拟计算世界里，“锡”的意义不大. Even a small telco will eat Akamai's global infrastructure for lunch in terms of "tons of tin,“所以我对这些数字一点也不感兴趣. 这就是你怎么处理罐头的, and most importantly what you charge in the face of your direct competition, 这真的很重要.
同样，云也不是一个基础设施游戏. 这是一场经济游戏. Companies looking to replace hosted tin with cloud tin must have an economic reason to do so. 纯粹的“现代化”论点几乎没有什么说服力. 它们必须具有易变的计算需求.
但, 我认为这是最重要的, 弹性策略是最重要的策略. If you have a single-vendor strategy you lose many advantages of a multivendor one-both in terms of your availability of service and in terms of being able to steer your prices. CDN relationships rarely cost a lot unless you are using them, and where you are using them you are generally charging for them. The logic of "phasing out" a relationship with Limelight would seem to be an unnecessary divorce in a market where polygamy is not only permissible, 但实际上是可取的和预期的.
如果这种逐步淘汰是真的, my gut instinct tells me there is more to it than an 公告 of an "exciting new deal with Akamai." Perhaps Rackspace sees the only way to catch up with Amazon is to partner with Akamai.
坦白地说, 最近看到了亚马逊的巨大进步, perhaps the only way Akamai can see being able to catch up with Amazon in the cloud space is by getting very close to Rackspace.
有趣的是, Rackspace在云计算方面远不如亚马逊成熟, Limelight是一个比Akamai更现代的CDN, and one that appears to be agnostic in its service provision.
在某些方面, I wonder if the long-term effect on share prices could be the reverse of what I noticed last Friday.
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