I learned a few things about Mirror Image today. Founded in 1999, it's one of the few dotcom era CDNs to have survived the bubble. 2006 has been the company's best year ever: 45% growth, contracts with major government agencies such as the Department of Defense and Center for Disease Control, great relationships with happy customers including Amazon, the New York Times, the Home Shopping Network.
VP Sales & Marketing Jim Hart (an old timer who's been with the company since 2001) tells me that Mirror Image maintains Content Access Points (CAP) in 23 major Internet exchange points around the globe. Jim says the CAP model is more efficient than Akamai's Edge Platform because with smaller pools of servers deployed across 71 countries, Akamai has less capacity for maintaining local copies of customer content. As a result, Mirror Image delivers a 98% cache-hit ratio (98% of end user requests are served from cache, rather than retrieved from content owners' home servers), versus Akamai's ~75%.
In addition to Akamai, Jim sees Limelight and VitalStream as major competitors. He hasn't run into CacheFly or BitGravity at all, and while he isn't worried about VeriSign's Kontiki either, he's "looking into P2P-related opportunities".
Is Mirror Image interested in partnering with hosting companies? Jim says of course - he's established ongoing relationships with "many best of breed providers". Such as Savvis, now that it's sold its own CDN? Jim says no comment. What about a CDN/web host merger, which Dan Golding from Tier 1 Research is rooting for? Jim says he's "absolutely not shutting any doors".
The first thought that crossed my mind was, maybe GI Partners could acquire Mirror Image and merge it with ThePlanet-EV1Servers? (I'd recommend choosing a name in advance to avoid the possibility of triple hyphenation.) But on second thought, TP-EV1's mostly unmanaged (at least for now) service might not be synergistic with Mirror Image's "Global 2000" user base.
Rackspace, on the other hand, might be a good match. In addition to the Fanatical Support it's known for, the company also seems popular among well-funded video startups. Once merged with Mirror Image, the combined entity could go public at CDN valuations! (Akamai trades at 18x annualized sales, versus Savvis' 2.4x.)
Or maybe Jim should leverage his successful, fast growing partnership with Amazon to offer global content distribution for data stored on S3?
Not that Mirror Image has any difficulty getting business. Jim says the content delivery market is WIDE open; at least 50% of the company's new signups come from first-time CDN users. Don't you wish the situation were the same in hosting?
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