Collaboration? Is that going to shape the future of CDN?

Wisdom of crowd isn’t a new thing but lately it has been getting way too much traction that people have to come up with a term for it, namely, crowdsourcing. BusinessWeek reportedly LG has got itself a new cell phone design based on the idea of crowdsourcing for just $20,000.

That is indeed a cheap way to outreach to talented people to come up with new ideas. The trend of further collaboration between organizations with individuals or smaller organizations is real; thanks to the proliferation of internet that connects people from different countries with diverse cultures.

Needless to say, I strongly believe that the CDN can be built based on collaboration with different companies, ISP, webhosting and media companies to share infrastructure via a common platform. The idea of collaborative CDN isn’t new as reported by Lydia’s blog http://blogs.gartner.com/lydia_leong/2008/12/19/aflexi-a-new-cdn-aggrega... from Gartner.

The current CDN industry is filled with monolithic architecture owned and run by a single company; everyone runs its own standard as compared to the ‘new’ CDN -Collaborative CDN is a lively, vibrant ever changing and mutating cloud that is composed of hundreds of companies of different sizes, types and functions. I’ve seen a collaborative CDN in the Chinese market three years ago, and I knew it was going to thrive as we knew more streaming and bandwidth hugger websites would appear.

Monolithic CDN is not exactly bad; it serves its purpose but it promotes less of open standard, keeping secret sauce to them and by having different set of architectures would ultimately increase cost to developing new technologies. On the other hand, a collaborative CDN would promote open standard, allowing third party vendors to develop technologies on top of the CDN, creating myriad of niche and specific technologies to serve certain problems, not to mention it would drive R&D cost down significantly.

Finally, I would interpret crowdsourcing as to organization with the power of crowd, collaborative CDN as to a common platform for thousands of small regional ISPs and webhosting companies to build a formidable third force in CDN industry, based on the principle of flexibility, choices and last but not least, collaboration.