As a result of the partnership, EdgeCast says it will immediately offer the Gomez ExperienceFirst platform to existing and potential customers. Gomez says this will enable active "real world" monitoring and benchmarking of the EdgeCast CDN from the Gomez ExperienceFirst network of more than 150 globally-located Internet backbone nodes.

Gomez says it provides a comprehensive solution for managing the web application experience from development through deployment and the entire application life cycle, featuring visual, functional and load testing, actual end-user and active website monitoring, and more than 40,000 data sources worldwide.

"While our existing customers have insight into performance via our industry-leading analytics, our claims of reliability, availability and speed can only take us so far with prospects," says James Segil, president of EdgeCast Networks. "Performance measurement testing via the Gomez ExperienceFirst platform and network will be especially valuable with prospects by empowering them to fully evaluate our network via an independent third party."

According to the most recent press release, EdgeCast says its network outperforms rivals, like Limelight Networks, Akamai and Vitalstream/Internap, by "significant margins" because it is "engineered with high-performance speed and a highly scalable, globally load balanced architecture that supports massive audiences and flash crowds."

There are currently more than 1,000 companies worldwide are using Gomez's ExperienceFirst services, says the company, "including 14 of the top 20 most visited websites."

Earlier this month, Gomez signed a referral partner agreement with web hosting provider Rackspace, which will be using the Gomez ExperienceFirst applications to assess the performance of its web applications.