Companies are struggling to keep up with their customer’s mobile browsing usage, which is one of the fastest growing data consumption segments. Problems include limited bandwidth on mobile devices, smaller screens, and limited capabilities, such as no Flash on the iPhone. Companies can lose out on financial transactions if the user experience isn’t good. Part of the challenge is different devices have different capabilities. For instance, the iPhone cannot do Flash, while Android devices can. Cotendo, a fast growing provider of CDN and Site Acceleration services provider aims to solve these problems. Their solution includes technologies that allow website operators and large enterprises to improve web performance and simplify content delivery management.
Today, Cotendo announced their Mobile Acceleration Suite (MAS), an innovation that delivers reliable and fast content acceleration on any network or device. MAS basically extends Cotendo’s existing hosted Web acceleration services and adds mobile-specific acceleration techniques. According to Cotendo, "For content providers, latency on mobile devices is one of the top revenue killers. Long page-load times reduce conversions and engagement with applications or sites. Designed from the ground up to accelerate mobile content and to integrate effortlessly with Cotendo’s widely used and customer proven content acceleration technologies, MAS elegantly solves latency and page-load performance problems caused by slow or variable mobile network data connectivity rates, giving mobile network operators, Website operators, and enterprise application developers a new way to ensure their content arrives faster and more reliably than ever to end users’ handsets."
The beauty of MAS is that it does this without any required modifications to the original site such as creation of separate Web sites or infrastructure dedicated to mobile content. It's very expensive to maintain regular website content plus a separate mobile content, especially as mobile devices change. The MAS suite applies optimizations to speed up mobile content delivery at the logic, content and network layers. Thus, customers can write their website content once and Cotendo takes care of the rest. Cotendo already has customers using MAS and it has resulted in huge improvements in mobile content delivery performance even for extremely dynamic content that has traditionally choked legacy CDNs and stymied other specialized mobile content delivery offerings.
How does it work?
The hosted platform includes an advanced DNS platform and routes users to the best on-ramp. It’s network aware and can detect which GGSN is the best on-ramp depending on where you are connected. The 2nd piece is the actual detection of the device type and the connection type. For instance, an iPhone on a WiFi network will be treated completely different than an iPhone on a 3G network. Similarly, a Blackberry on a 2G network is treated differently from a 3G connection. They detect the device’s capabilities and the parameters of that particular connection and tune the delivery strategy to maximize the user experience for that connection. They also example throughput and latency of the connection and tune accordingly.
Additionally, Cotendo has a front-end optimization that includes best practices optimizations that are constantly updating. One of the things it can do is take inline CSS, JavaScript, and images and combine 30 requests into a single request. They also have advanced image compression that can scale images according to the size of device’s screen.
I spoke with Misha Kuperman VP of Operations at Contendo about their solution. When asked how their solution compares with Akamai, a well-known CDN, he explained that making a change on Cotendo to your configuration results in changes taking about a minute to take effect, while Akamai, a well-known CDN competing provider can take 4-8 hours.
He explained that the solution includes mobile content, network and logic optimizations along with Dynamic Content Acceleration for personalized and adapted content, with integrated SSL and object caching. This will also include HTTP streaming for progressive downloads for mobile video.
Besides the launch of their new suite specifically focused on acceleration of mobile websites, Cotendo also announced a new funding round - a $17 million private funding round. The funds will fuel the company’s long-term growth strategy and continued technology innovation in the accelerated delivery of highly-personalized dynamic content for mobile and web applications. In addition, the funds will be used to continue Cotendo’s global expansion into new markets and fast growing regions around the world. Citrix and Juniper Networks, ironically both part of my recent Top 20 VoIP Innovators list are two new strategic investors. Existing venture backers include Sequoia, Benchmark and Tenaya Capital. Citrix and Juniper, market leaders in their respective industries, join the growing ranks of Cotendo strategic partners, including AT&T, Google and Sumitomo.
“While using Cotendo services we’ve seen up to a 33 percent performance improvement on our site. That’s huge because our customers expect instant response when downloading apps to their handsets,” said Allan Moger, Operations Manager for GetJar, the world’s largest open app and entertainment store for smartphones with 2 billion downloads to date. “Aside from the performance benefits, we chose to use Cotendo services because they understand the importance of the mobile space and are ahead of the curve in improving services for the mobile industry.”
Cotendo’s Mobile Acceleration Suite offers mobile-specific solutions that also leverage the company’s other innovative services for content acceleration including, Dynamic Site Acceleration, CDN Load Balancing, Advanced DNS services, and the unique Cloudlet™ Platform - the first CDN-integrated High Performance Cloud Application Environment. MAS is fully integrated with these and other Cotendo offerings. Customers can manage all of Cotendo’s services through a single simple-to-use portal.
“Cotendo is a one stop shop for Redfin’s content delivery and acceleration needs both for mobile and traditional end users. And thanks to performance improvements resulting from implementation of Cotendo’s MAS, Redfin has seen healthy traffic growth in our mobile apps. Cotendo’s console provides detailed real-time views of our traffic volumes, site usage patterns, and associated costs,” says Michael Young, CTO of Redfin.com, one of the largest suppliers of real-estate mobile applications and Web-based real estate brokerage services. “Their innovative technology has helped us focus on what we do best – providing the best real estate search, service offerings and market transparency on any device.”
“Delivering solutions to hard problems, such as last-mile delivery of complex, dynamic, and highly personalized content, is exactly the type of challenge we like to work on at Cotendo,” says Ronni Zehavi, CEO of Cotendo. “Our technology team will relentlessly pursue innovation to ensure that we are providing high-value solutions to high-class problems that keep CIOs and CEOs up at night. We want to give them back their peace of mind and boost their bottom line while delighting their end users with unbelievably fast content delivery anywhere, anytime, on any device.”
