I’m currently working on writing a research note called “Who’s Who in Content Delivery Networks“. The CDN space isn’t quite large enough yet to justify one of Gartner’s formal rating methodologies (the Magic Quadrant or MarketScope), but with the proliferation of vendors who can credibly serve enterprise customers, the market deserves a vendor note.

The format of a Who’s Who looks a lot like our Cool Vendors format — company name, headquarters location, website, a brief blurb about who they are and what they do, and a recommendation for what to use them for. I like to keep my vendor write-up formats pretty consistent, so each CDN has a comment about its size (and length of time in the business and funding source, if relevant), its footprint, services offered, whether there’s an application acceleration solution and if so what the technology approach to that is, pricing tier (premium-priced, competitive, etc.), and general strategy.

Right now, I’m writing up the ten vendors that are most commonly considered by enterprise buyers of CDN, and then planning to add some quick bullet-points of other vendors in the ecosystem but who aren’t CDNs themselves (equipment vendors, enterprise internal CDN alternatives, etc.), probably more in a ‘here are some vendor names’ with no blurbs, fashon.

For those of you who follow my research, I’m also about to publish my yearly update of the CDN market that’s targeted at our IT buyer clients (i.e., how to choose a vendor and what the pricing is like), along with another note on the emergence of cloud CDNs (to answer a very common inquiry, which is, “Can I replace my Akamai services with Amazon?”).