Yottaa’s web optimization service to rely on Fastly for delivery, edge compute
Yottaa, a provider of website optimization services, expanded its relationship with Fastly in a deal which will see it transition to a managed services model.
Yottaa launched in 2009 as a web optimization service and also built a CDN. It has offered a hybrid in-house CDN and external CDN service in the years since then. Yottaa has now partnered with Fastly for the last seven-plus years for content delivery services, and will now officially discontinue its own CDN service and rely exclusively on Fastly’s services. Yottaa confirmed it will use Fastly’s next-gen WAF, image optimization, and compute infrastructure offerings.
Yottaa will focus its own development efforts around edge and browser applications for digital performance monitoring and site speed optimization. It has built a competency in support of e-commerce applications and sites.
Yottaa was part of a wave of companies that were launched around the 2010 time frame that focused on front-end optimization for websites (with some acquired in a short time frame). FEO is a set of techniques and best practices aimed at improving the performance, speed and overall user experience of a website. Those techniques include image optimization, minimizing page load sizes, compressing files and otherwise optimizing web pages by reducing or managing API calls to origin servers and third party providers.
Over time, CDN providers such as Akamai, Cloudflare and Fastly added image optimization and other services beyond content delivery through both organic development and M&A. While Yottaa has built a respectable base of customers in the e-commerce vertical, CDN competitors have been able to spend more on service development and infrastructure for global PoPs than companies like Yottaa were able to invest. The move comes a bit late, but is the right decision. Yottaa needs to focus and channel resources into innovation and get away from raw infrastructure delivery. Angle: Yottaa’s exit from the CDN business is only a surprise in the sense that we did not realize they still operated their own network.
Yottaa joins the ranks of Lumen, StackPath, and others that have fallen by the wayside or made the decision to exit CDN, as Akamai, Cloudflare, and to a lesser extent Fastly, have achieved scale, and moved the CDN and edge services market ahead. In order to keep up, Yottaa will have to continue innovating. And if it is fortunate, could have its technology acquired by the likes of Fastly. The main risk is that it may have waited too long. The CDN landscape continues to consolidate at the top and is becoming more of a commodity in that the competition and innovation is happening at the value-add and innovation layer. It is more about what is delivered on top of CDN than the CDN itself. Recent developments, like StackPath’s closure, show what can happen if that lesson is not learned and a fast pivot away does not happen.
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Article Topics
CDN | edge compute | Fastly | Yottaa
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