Finally, organizations are realizing how to manage Web sites effectively. IT is reclaiming responsibility for most rogue Internet efforts, while marketing is now responsible for providing critical content, specifying applications and attracting eyeballs. Yet as a service-delivery vehicle, the Internet's problems are far from solved.
Content is king, but discontent reigns supreme.
There simply hasn't been enough real competition to drive prices down and encourage widespread adoption. Akamai leads the pack in mind and market share, and continues to add new capabilities while imbedding itself into switches, caches and application servers. But if any of three recent alliances bear fruit, Akamai's lead could diminish. First, Cisco pledged to bring service providers together to form the Content Alliance, which purports to advance the development of protocols to join disparate caching systems into a single manageable architecture. The components in CDNs have not yet matured to the point where the difference between middling and top-end solutions are minor, as you'd find with, say, Intel servers.