Technicolor Dreams
"We feel that the testing they did on our network validated how strong our delivery is in both Europe and the U.S.," says Mark Hayes, Highwinds' VP of marketing and business development. "We have close to a terabit of network capacity but we weren't sure—given the fact that we are new to the media delivery space—that it would hold up to rigorous testing for 40Gbps transfers. It did and they were comfortable with our performance."
Reach. Just as important as transit links was the requirement for reach into markets that Technicolor targets for this year's growth.
"This year is all about the U.S. and Europe," says Dougall, "Because of the short window of time we've set to get our streaming delivery up and running, we wanted to focus on building out capacity without needing to spend the time and money ourselves to get into a significant peering arrangement in Europe. Highwinds already had a significant number of those arrangements in place.
"Our downloads will go over their transit network to Europe," says Dougall, "but we won't stage downloads at their POPs, since we already have our own. We will, however, store our on-demand streaming content at their POPs.
"Into Europe we have a strong peering infrastructure," says Highwinds' Hayes, "focusing about 90% of our capacity in Europe on peer connections rather than just transit links, which provides customers access to key peering arrangements."
Rapport without riposte. Dougall says this last criteria is one that measure integration between existing services on both sides of the partner relationship, but also delves in to the partner CDN's philosophy.
"We want to have our efforts in due diligence rewarded in a very simple manner," says Dougall. "We want to grow our capacity without having to spend the time to grow our own immediately, but in a way that we could brand it as our own to our customers. Highwinds' API allows us to leverage their StrikeTracker dashboard technology, integrating our infrastructure into their infrastructure in a way that looks like everything is riding on or stored in our network."