EdgeCast has announced the beta of its new application delivery network service. For those of you who are CDN-watchers, that means it’s leaping into the fray with Akamai (Dynamic Site Accelerator and Web Application Accelerator, bundles where DSA is B2C and WAA is B2B), Cotendo’s DSA, and CDNetworks’s Dynamic Web Acceleration. EdgeCast’s technology is another TCP optimization approach, of the variety commonly used in application delivery controllers (like F5’s Web Application Accelerator) and WAN optimization controllers (like Riverbed).

EdgeCast seems to be gaining traction with my client base in the last few weeks — they’re appearing in a lot more shortlists. This appears to be the direct result of aggressive SEO-based marketing.

What’s important about this launch: EdgeCast isn’t just a standalone CDN. It is also a CDN partner to many carriers, and it is deriving an increasingly larger percentage of its revenue by selling its software. That means that EdgeCast introducing ADN services potentially has ripple effects on the ecosystem, in terms of spreading ADN technology more widely.