Yesterday, there was a lot of talk about AT&T (T) and its CDN announcement and as usual, a lot of questions, mostly from Wall Street, on what this means to Akamai (AKAM) and the rest of the CDN industry. While many sites covered the news, I saw very few sites give more details on what, if any, impact this has on the market. Lots of re-hash of the press release with very little additional info or data to compare AT&T’s plans with the rest of the market.
To me, the important take away of the announcement was AT&T’s appointment of Cathy Martine as the executive vice president of Content Distribution. AT&T has had technical folks working on its CDN offering since last year, but to date, did not have anyone leading the business. It’s really hard to start any new product offering in the market if no one is responsible for it on the business side, which AT&T now has. A 25+ year veteran at AT&T, Cathy formerly launched and ran the company’s VoIP product line but will now focus solely on the CDN business. Late yesterday, I had a chance to speak to Cathy and some of her technical team to get my questions answered.
As usual, Dan puts it all into perspective…
