Limelight Networks to continue to expand capacity in India

Content delivery network service Limelight Networks said it has doubled its presence in India in the last few months and would be adding more capacity in the country over the course of the year.

The US-based firm, which provides a network for delivery of digital media content and software, is expanding its presence globally this year, said Robert Lento, CEO at Limelight Networks.

“India is a very big market and as the number of internet-enabled devices in the country and the amount of India-specific content continues to grow, the demand from our customers is growing and we have prioritised India as one of our key focus areas,” said Lento.

The India focus would continue through the first half of the next year, he said. Limelight would be adding more locations within India over the next few quarters to achieve greater geographic diversity. While the company did not disclose capacity numbers by location, Lento said Limelight started the year with 65 terabits of capacity per second and will end the year with about 80 terabits per second and within that, on a percentage basis, India was the highest.

The company is investing in Edge services and has announced new products which will help in low latency environments, especially for live events like gaming or sports. The company is currently testing this with a set of customers and believes that there is high demand for something like this. Smaller applications like AB testing or image resizing or watermarking, which would earlier be done either on the cloud or on premise, can be done more quickly and efficiently using Edge applications. Security is another area where Lento expects to leverage the Edge infrastructure to create more services directly for customers. Limelight will be adding more people in India over the course of the year at a “rate that is disproportionate to other locations”, he said.

Another impact the pandemic had was studios shutting down and no new content being available, in addition to no live sports. Now that sporting activities have resumed and new content has started coming out again, it will lead to an increase in demand. Lento said that the pandemic has changed user habits forever, and that the industry is at an inflection point with people realising that they can meet most of their viewing needs through internet-enabled devices. This has implications for companies like Limelight from the investment standpoint, and Lento said he is inclined to err on the side of faster investment. BCS Bureau