(Adapted from an article within Business Today March 2010, Newsmakers section, page 20 and 21. Originally written by Catherine Yong)

Continuation from the previous blog post...

According to Aflexi CEO, Wong Whei Meng, content delivery networks (CDN) have existed since 1998 when a group of MIT graduates and employees founded a small startup company named Akamai. Today, it is a multimillion dollar company headquartered in Cambridge with their customer base comprising of some of the largest brands on the Internet such as Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Amazon.

Whei says: "We do something similar to Akamai, but with a different model." He continues that Aflexi tries to make CDN a new way of Web hosting, and that it should not be a mysterious or newfangled technology that keeps users away. Instead being accessible and simple enough so its usefulness can be commoditised. The faster route to that objective, would be to approach Web hosting companies rather than individual companies, one by one.

"Our license model is such that we license our technologies to hosting companies. They in turn service the customer company or its Webmaster, who is the end user in this scenario. The idea behind our business model is that we do not have Akamai's marketing capability; they are able to reach to so many customers. So we outreach to Web hosting companies that already have existing customers."

Aflexi began free trials since September 2009, and just five months later have begun charging for it. Currently Aflexi has two paying customers with discussions ongoing for three more.

"This industry is pretty small and successes are spread through word of mouth. There is not much differentiation and a very strong me-too mentality exists", says Whei.

On the plus side, two of the largest Web hosting companies in Malaysia, Shinjiru.com and Exabytes have already signed on. Because of its focus on the U.S. market, it could be signing up a U.S.-based business and two more based in Singapore and Israel respectively.