Living on the edge

You haven’t been very long at Edgio, but there have been some pretty big changes since you came on board.

I joined the company in February of last year. We spent some time with our board looking at Edgio, known as Limelight at the time. This media delivery business hadn’t performed nearly as well as its peers, yet had developed a global, performant network and assets. We saw a marketplace opportunity to deliver what we call edge-enabled solutions – closest to where users or viewers consume their digital content.

We realised that delivering edge services could be a big key to solving our problems and a massive growth opportunity. People expect secure, fast and reliable experiences, and this all happens at the edge. So we decided to transform Limelight from just offering a video CDN solution to being an edge-enabled solutions provider.

In the fall of last year, we acquired Layer0, which gave us the application stack that we put on our network. Layer0 also gave us deep software and architecture skills. With that, we could transform the way we thought about solutions on the edge and make them software-based. Then we brought over EdgeCast in June, which more than doubled our network and revenue, and offered an industry-leading security stack that we could put on our edge. Today we’ve got the applications, the security and the edge platform, and we have integrated them.

The last 10 years has been about cloud and SaaS. The next 10 years will be about the edge. Most companies have a hard time getting there themselves. We want to be the platform of choice to help companies take advantage of the edge – and that’s really our focus.

We have also become the most complete web application and API platform in the world. We offer the fastest speed, the best security and the most productivity.

What are your media opportunities?

Edgio is doubling down on our video opportunities and has invested in them. As you know, EdgeCast is already the premier live events company in the world. When you complement that with what we have – our VOD and our edge platform – it allows us to offer the full, complete package for streaming and video. In just 15 months, we have transformed our network and it’s now the number one performing company in the world. We recently surpassed Google to achieve this #1 ranking according to PerfOps.

We are very quickly close to becoming the top player for streaming as well. In the meantime, we will continue to look at acquisitions including security to broaden that part of the platform.

How have your numbers gone up in the last 15 months?

Before, we had 20 customers that made up most of the revenue, which means it was very concentrated. Fast forward to today and with EdgeCast and the other applications, we now have thousands of customers. So in a period of 15 months, we have gone from a small number of clients to a far more diverse base. This was mostly through acquisition but we’re expanding on that as well.

When you look at the application stack, we know we have a winner. Every company in the world has a website. Every company in the world needs to do this better. We’re really focused on companies that have high-stakes websites. E-commerce, for instance, is one area where people who do commerce want to be at the edge, because speed and security really matter to their shoppers.

When we were just Limelight, our addressable market was probably in the $4-5bn range. Now it’s more than $30bn. So we’ve expanded our addressable market and the number of customers. And more importantly, we now have the most complete solution and a very large untapped market in our sight.

Can you elaborate on the security bit?

In the last ten years, many have moved to the cloud and to SaaS. It’s been great for scale and efficiency, but think about security. Typically, security for the last 20 years has been about building a perimeter around your assets. Yet with cloud and SaaS, you don’t have a perimeter anymore.

So how do you do security? That needs to be done at the edge. How do you improve the productivity of your IT shop? When you’re trying to put all these pieces together that are coming from different places, the only way to do that is aggregate it at the edge and pre-configure it. And then, in terms of performance, the internet wasn’t made to handle this kind of traffic. So as a CDN, Edgio can bypass the internet and take it right from your origination straight to the ISP and your eyeballs.

How has your role in the Middle East evolved?

We probably have the largest footprint in the Middle East now of all our competitors, with the numbers of countries and presence. We’re now expanding our edge solutions here. We see our ISP relationships as partnerships. To have edge-enabled solutions, we need to have a good ecosystem and partnership with the ISPs and not just see them as part of a vendor relationship.

We’ve invested heavily to have that as the base for our investment moving forward. So we’ve worked with the ISPs and we have our edge cache embedded inside most networks within the Middle Eastern countries where we have a presence. That’s been a big growth area for us.

Many of those have come online already and many more will come online each quarter as we go. And we’re expanding as the traffic grows in the region with those operators. We have embarked on this exciting journey, but the only way Edgio works is by having the most scaled and the most performant platform in the world. If you don’t have that, nothing else matters.

We have put a lot of time and money into this; we took our best engineers and we said, “Your job now is to make us the best in the world.” We are making sure that 98% of the world’s population is within a few miles of one of our PoPs. The whole world is living more and more digital, and these experiences have to ride on somebody’s highway. Why not ours?

Can you elaborate on marketplace changes?

The Middle East becomes important with countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, where the demographic is so young. All the e-commerce for instance is really starting to take off, and that’s going to be a key focus for us.

Where we were previously focused on the content delivery side, we are now moving more into the security space. This really helps us diversify and make use of all the investments we’ve made into the Middle East so far. We will continue to invest in the region and continue to put more feet on the ground in the region to back up the investment now.

Another big dynamic to think about is how social media and the millennials build their social networks. Before, your tribe was your country or your town demographic, but this doesn’t hold true anymore. Today it can span the globe and everybody’s social norms are being blended in this social cocktail.

What about the underserved markets?

There’s a lot of infrastructure that’s coming, and 5G is one of them. What’s interesting about the rural areas is that although there may not be that much fibre, Wi-Fi, 5G and satellite are trying to address those areas. Our job is making those transmissions that much more efficient. You can take a Starlink box and put it anywhere in the world and you’ll be able to watch Netflix or any content. Edgio goes beyond our physical infrastructure to all the caching and compression to optimise experiences.

What are some of the challenges you see going forward?

I think the biggest challenge is that people are still thinking in the paradigms that existed 20 years ago. Technology, however, has totally transformed and turned upside down these paradigms. We have to help people navigate edge technology adoption in these new paradigms. We can provide that edge platform to make digital living faster, safer and a better experience.

Internally, Edgio’s challenge is to stay focused and not chase too many opportunities. That’s always a challenge. There’s a lot of things you can go after. We’ve got to be good at what we do, but what we’re finding is the market dynamics and our strategy are providing us a nice tailwind. Execution is the biggest challenge – execution focus and the ever-changing set of priorities in the industry.