Patent ID: 8244915

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for uniquely identifying assets in a federation, the federation comprising a plurality of distributed platforms, each distributed platform of the plurality of distributed platforms operating a different set of servers for serving at least some of said assets, the computer-implemented method comprising: configuring at least one server that is operated by a first distributed platform of the plurality of distributed platforms to distribute an asset for a first customer of the first distributed platform; providing a first domain name to identify the asset in the first distributed platform; configuring a second domain name as an alias for the first domain name such that a request that requests the first customer's asset using the second domain name is aliased to request the first customer's asset using the first domain name, wherein the second domain name is specified by the first customer; allocating server capacity from at least one server of the first distributed platform for use by a second distributed platform of the plurality of distributed platforms to distribute an asset for a second customer of the second distributed platform; and authorizing a third domain name that is specified by at least one of the second customer and the second distributed platform to ensure uniqueness to the second domain name.