Lydia Leong

Back in 2002, Yahoo acquired Inktomi, a struggling software vendor whose fortunes had turned unpleasantly with the dot-com crash. While at the time of the acquisition, Inktomi had refocused its efforts upon search, its original flagship product — the one that really drove its early revenue growth — was something called Traffic Server.
Traffic Server [...]

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It’s been mentioned to me that my “what are you hearing about from clients” posts are particularly interesting, so I’ll try to do a regular update of this sort. I have some limits on how much detail I can blog and stay within Gartner’s policies for analysts, so I can’t get too specific; if you [...]

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I’ve recently contributed to a couple of our hype cycles.
Gartner’s very first Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing features a whole array of cloud-related technologies and services. One of the most interesting things about this hype cycle, I think, is the sheer number of concepts that we believe will hit the plateau of productivity in just [...]

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In CDN news this past weekend, a judge has overturned the jury verdict in the Akamai vs. Limelight patent infringement case. Akamai has said it intends to appeal.
The judge cited Muniauction v. Thomson Corp. as the precedent for a judgement of law, which basically says that if you have a method claim in a patent [...]

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My newest research notes are all collaborative efforts.
Forecast: Sizing the Cloud; Understanding the Opportunities in Cloud Services. This is Gartner’s official take on cloud segmentation and forecasting through 2013. It was a large-team effort; my contribution was primarily on the compute services portion.
Invest Insight: Content Delivery Network Arbitrage Increases Market Competition. This is a note [...]

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Cotendo, a new CDN backed by VC heavyweights Sequoia Capital and Benchmark Capital, has launched. The technical founders are ex-Commtouch; the VPs of Ops and Marketing are ex-Limelight. Cotendo is positioning itself as a software company (rather than an infrastructure company, per the market shift I blogged about a few months ago), but it’s not [...]

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First-generation CDNs use a highly distributed edge model, and include companies like Akamai and Sandpiper Networks (whose acquisiton chain goes Digital Island, Exodus, Savvis, Level 3).
Second-generation CDNs basically try to achieve most of the performance of a first-generation CDN without needing hundreds of POPs, aiming for just a few dozen locations. Speedera (eventually acquired by [...]

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Gartner clients might be interested in my just-published piece of research, which is a TCO toolkit for comparing the cost of internal and cloud infrastructure.
A not-new link, but which I nonetheless want to draw people’s attention to as much as possible: Yahoo’s best practices for speeding up your web site is a superb list of [...]

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For many months now, CDN industry insiders have gossiped that Panther Express was in financial trouble. Panther was caught with the bad luck of mistiming the funding cycle, leaving them to try to raise capital at a point when the capital markets were essentially frozen. Moreover, a large percentage of their revenues were tied to [...]

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A long-standing puzzle for myself and my various colleagues who cover application-fluent networking: Why don’t more SaaS providers adopt application delivery networks (ADNs), either via a service, or via application delivery controller (ADC) hardware?
Even if a SaaS vendor perceives their performance as being just fine for the typical US-based user, performance is often an issue [...]

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