ECHOING A COMMON theme sounding throughout the technology industry, a delicate balance between improving quality and controlling costs emerged in various product and service offerings from CDN (content delivery network) providers this week at the Content Networking Event Fall 2001 in San Jose, Calif.

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Speedera Networks at the show introduced SpeedSuite, a set of managed services designed to enhance the delivery of any type of online content.

Going head-to-head against market dominator Akamai Technologies, Speedera's SpeedSuite offering lets customers purchase a single bucket of bandwidth and storage that can be used for all content types including live and on-demand streaming media, encrypted data, and digital and Web content. Customers can also select individual SpeedSuite services, such as site delivery with HTML caching or dynamic content assembly, global load balancing, personalized content targeting, and management and reporting capabilities.

Enterprises are turning to CDN services to streamline the management of an increasingly complex Web infrastructure, according to Gordon Smith, vice president of marketing at Speedera, in Santa Clara, Calif.

"It is the notion of simplifying their lives, providing the IT manager with a solution that involves only one purchase decision with one vendor, one [service-level agreement], and only one implementation. Outsourcing the entire ball of wax to a content delivery service provider like us makes their life a lot easier," he said.

Additionally, CDN services can help trim infrastructure expenses, which is a popular notion right now, Smith said.

"The more content that is offloaded to our edge for delivery, the more the Web site infrastructure can be reduced or IT managers can avoid making further hardware and software investments," he said.

Meanwhile, tapping Web services for content delivery, Denver-based Tian Software rolled out CacheDirect, an application designed to reduce costs by pre-populating edge servers with relevant content. Rather than just caching the most popular content, CacheDirect understands the device, location, and activity of users across edges and retrieves the relevant information to store in the cache, according to Todd Kelley, manager of product marketing at Tian. Understanding the context of the user can help enterprises deliver only the most relevant content from the edge, he added.

CacheDirect is the latest addition to Tian's line of Web services applications, which wrap business applications in XML and use HTTP, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) to deliver data over the Web.

Also on hand at the show, Woburn, Mass.-based CDN provider Mirror Image Internet announced its Global Alliance Partner program designed to build a more comprehensive CDN offering through improved relationships with partners and resellers.

"From the maturing of the CDN space, people are realizing for [a CDN service] to be successful it needs to be part of a solution, not just simply a single service," said Bob Hammond, senior vice president at Mirror Image.

Twenty companies have joined the Global Alliance Partner program, including Diveo Broadband Network, Interactive Horizons, iQuotient, and XCache Technologies.

Also at the show, French content networking vendor ActiVia Networks took the wraps off Constellation, a CDN offering designed to let network operators and service providers leverage their own network to deliver content services, which is a more cost-effective approach, according to Pierre Liautaud, chairman and CEO of ActiVia, in Sophia Anipolis, France.

Constellation features distributed overlay architecture, content aware capabilities, live streaming media support, advanced redirection, and content peering. The company also introduced the AStar Content Router, which works with any cache engine, and Constellation Manager, which is designed to manage system, traffic, and content issues.

Meanwhile, SpiderSoftware introduced SpiderCache Enterprise 2.1, featuring support for Microsoft's ASP.net, increased clustering support, and improved usability for large cluster farms. SpiderCache Enterprise is designed to accelerate the delivery of dynamic content and can help reduce infrastructure costs by allowing more users to leverage the same hardware, said Kevin Mallory, director of engineering at SpiderCache in Vancouver, British Columbia.