Ankeena – And What CDN Means To Customers In EMEA

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I was planning to mention the strength of Content Delivery Networks in EMEA anyway – but the news of our intention to acquire Ankeena Networks, and its industry-leading suite of new media infrastructure solutions, made the topic impossible to ignore!

I have talked before about how often I encounter questions about our approach to CDNs from service provider customers around the region; most recently I’ve had these kinds of conversations in the UK and the Netherlands, following on from similar ones all around the Middle East. We’ve also got EMEA customers prepared to go public on their Juniper deployments in support of IPTV and digital broadcasting – watch this space!

Of course Ankeena was already an established partner for Juniper, helping us to provide innovative solutions in the multiplay space – enabling our service provider customers to further monetize their networks by offering TV-like quality of experience for users, while maintaining a much lower total cost of ownership. In my experience, it is an area that many SPs want to exploit, but know that they need expert partners to do it full justice.

Overall, our role with SPs is evolving – as their business environment becomes more challenging, many of them increasingly look to us for business consultancy and technical solutions as a package. Having the Ankeena team and know-how as part of our family, already working within the Junos Ready Software framework – along with the CDN overlay team for EMEA that I mentioned in my last blog – will link perfectly into this evolution as a very compelling proposition. In my experience providers like to see a strong vendor taking responsibility for an emerging trend, without stifling it. I’m really looking forward to developing this interest as the year progresses, and also stepping it into the mobile space too.

While I was in London recently, I spent some time with some of EMEA’s top industry analysts. We were discussing Juniper’s business strategy for the region, drilling into our enterprise and SP business, and showing how our unfolding “new network” vision is being received by customers and partners. I wanted to listen to them as much them listening to me, to be honest – and we had some great conversations about customers’ requirements if the network is to fully support business objectives.