On the heels of the announcement of an Akamai/Riverbed partnership, Citrix has taken an investment in Cotendo, and announced the development of an integrated ADC/CDN solution.

This is a different sort of deal than Akamai/Riverbed. Whereas that deal addresses a particular use case — enterprises who want to accelerate a SaaS solution but the SaaS provider isn’t cooperating — the Citrix/Cotendo deal is intended to enhance dynamic acceleration by integrating with an on-premise ADC (in this case, a Citrix NetScaler, of course).

Back during the Netli days, Netli actually coupled their service, in most cases, with a lightweight on-premises ADC to ensure first-mile acceleration as well. This was phased out when Netli was acquired by Akamai, which did not want to have to deal with CPE (customer premises equipment). While there had been talks of partnerships with ADC vendors, the Akamai acquisition essentially killed them, and in the four years that have passed, this excellent, even vital, idea has essentially lain fallow.

Optimal acceleration of content requires end-to-end solutions — optimizing of the content itself, optimization of the network from the first mile all the way to the last mile, and optimization on the device. To make this happen, CDN providers need to have tight integration with ADC vendors.

I like the partnership and the investment, and I hope that it paves the way for an ecosystem in which many CDNs offer tighter integration with a variety of ADC devices from a range of popular vendors.