The distribution of on-demand content for eLearning and onboarding, along with conducting webcasts, digital town hall, and all-hands meetings is a strategy widely embraced by organizations for saving time and growing their revenue. Engaging videos facilitate better retention of information and boost employee productivity. However, this practice raises a question—are company servers able to support such high bandwidth formats?

What is Enterprise Content Delivery Network (eCDN) Software?

An eCDN is a network that utilizes private infrastructure to deliver content. eCDN provides organizations with more control and visibility of their content delivery since proxy and cache servers can be located within their LAN or WAN, or within a dedicated data center or cloud instance.

eCDNs help organizations share internal videos with their staff based out of diverse geographic locations, ensuring fast delivery with negligible impact on the network bandwidth. These networks also help distribute content to external users (such as customers and clients) by using an organization’s worldwide network to deliver videos to the immediate public CDN ingest server.

For corporations, the need for eCDNs continue to grow

Company networks are complex and have seldom been designed to accommodate the growing use of videos in global businesses. Servers within companies are configured for email, file storage, and the like, so they struggle to maintain the same efficiency for high bandwidth-consuming formats, such as videos and large-scale live events. In these live events, multiple individual users simultaneously connect to the same video, thereby driving large amounts of unstructured data to be generated which can cause network congestion, compromising the quality of the video stream.

Files are large, bandwidth needs are high, and viewers demand smooth, high-quality video. This is where enterprise content delivery networks (eCDNs) come in to shield company servers from the additional load.

What does G2 say about eCDN?

In the post-pandemic hybrid workplace, video content is consuming considerably more network bandwidth than planned.

Organizations are seeing a rise in demand for live and on-demand videos for connecting with employees and staying in touch with customers, suppliers, and partners—for corporate events, employee training, meetings, or news announcements. 85% of companies think that online experiences for events are here to stay.

59%

of executives prefer videos instead of reading a text on the same topic. In addition, users can remember an incredible 95% of a message when it’s packaged in a video. A message conveyed within a written text, on the other hand, can be remembered at a paltry 10%.

Source: Insivia

While virtual events provide attendees with the ease to view from any location at any time, technical glitches in the online platform will eventually curtail the impact of the video.

Category traffic to eCDN software has observed a steady growth since the beginning of 2021 on G2.

When the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, business video usage saw a spike, as workers attended a host of virtual on-demand and live corporate events. As organizations across the world are now planning to return to their workplaces, companies are looking to adopt a hybrid return-to-office strategy where enterprises are implementing eCDN software for simplifying operations and securing their network to meet their training requirements. This trend is also reflected in our G2 data, as we see more users searching for and choosing a good eCDN offering to suit their organizational objectives.

G2 Grid® for Enterprise Content Delivery Network (eCDN) Software

The G2 Grid® for Enterprise Content Delivery Network (eCDN) category provides a look into the top vendors in the eCDN space. G2 scores products and sellers based on reviews gathered from our user community, as well as data aggregated from online sources and social networks. Together, these scores are mapped on our proprietary G2 Grid®, which can be used to compare products, streamline the buying process, and quickly identify the best products based on peer experiences.

eCDN vs. traditional CDN: what is the difference?

A traditional CDN is a network of servers positioned in various data centers around the globe to bring content geographically closer to the consumer. These services expedite content delivery and reduce buffering problems. While CDN and eCDN are fundamentally used for accomplishing the same objective, they are different in ways that are quite essential with regard to the enterprise network.

G2 data shows that traffic to the Content Delivery Network (CDN) category has consistently been higher than the traffic to the Enterprise Content Delivery Network (eCDN) category.

The chart above shows the ratio of Content Delivery Network (CDN) category traffic to Enterprise Content Delivery Network (eCDN) category traffic, with the traffic to the former category being 9 to 14 times higher than the traffic to the latter category. CDNs play a pivotal role in the streaming industry which has been booming. CDNs are suited to distribute bandwidth-intense media at an enormous scale with outstanding performance and reliability. This makes CDNs more suited to organizations looking to share videos with the general public outside of their network.

eCDNs can stream to a moderate number of viewers. As companies plan to return to offices, they are going to discover the need for an eCDN to prevent congestion on corporate networks and support the streaming of video for conducting operations while ensuring the safety of employees. CDN exerts too much bandwidth burden on corporate internet connections despite it optimizing bandwidth for internet traffic. An eCDN is modified for enterprise networks to alleviate bottlenecks due to peak demand by making optimum use of the internal corporate network. Edge servers that are located at the network edge for reducing latency are used to deliver the content to the viewers over LAN.

Additionally, CDN will tend to have recurring operating expenses that are disbursed by the organization on a monthly or annual basis. An eCDN is generally a capital expense for the organization investing in a solution for their network and requirements.

Benefits of eCDN

Videos have become an essential part of corporate communication as they facilitate collaboration with clients and among employees. An eCDN solution provides a host of benefits to the organization.

Cost savings: Creating a secure network to deliver content to and from many endpoints is a prolonged job and incurs exorbitant costs. Using an eCDN maintains a single stream on WAN and LAN for webcasts and live streaming. Reduced load on corporate networks helps cut down bandwidth consumption and prevents costly network upgrades.
Ease of deployment: eCDN servers are virtual devices that can be installed on dedicated or shared hardware and reconfigured at any time. Adaptive bitrate technology and multicasting facilitate transcoding of the video in various formats and can be viewed with any bandwidth.
Optimization of network delivery: eCDNs improve the network through dynamic caching and deliver content to the viewers watching from the same location.
Increased efficiency and ease of administration: Deployment of eCDN aids in performance monitoring by enabling organizations to keep watch over the viewership on each eCDN server.

Which eCDN solutions should I opt for?

There are several types of eCDN to choose from. When choosing an eCDN software, it is important to remember that the final selection should echo the company’s business strategies and objectives in the long run.

Multicast protocol: Multicast is a communication protocol that minimizes network traffic while disseminating large volumes of data. It helps with bandwidth optimization as a single version of a data file, such as a live video stream, is delivered to hundreds or thousands of users concurrently. Multicast is a robust delivery option for live streaming and video on demand (VOD). As a network protocol, it is highly scalable and is well suited for large enterprises.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking: Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking makes use of personal devices active on a network to share data files with one another. Rather than installing new hardware, it leverages the organization’s existing network infrastructure to create a distributed network of end-user client devices. Since P2P networking virtually needs no infrastructure, it is faster to deploy.
P2P is best used for live events and scheduled rebroadcasts since these solutions yield the best results when users are viewing the same content simultaneously. However, it is not as robust with VOD since user access is less orchestrated.
Caching servers: Video caching temporarily stores videos accessed frequently or video segments in close proximity to where viewers are located on the network. When the first viewer requests a video, the cache fetches it from the video source and stores a local copy. When other viewers in the same location request the same video, they receive it from the local cache instead of downloading it again from the remote server. This results in bandwidth optimization as the video no longer travels the entire length of the corporate network.
Video caching is one of the most versatile set-it-and-forget-it types of eCDN solutions which works well for both live events and VOD.

Road ahead

Video consumption is a fast-expanding market and the adoption of video channels as a conduit for training and communication purposes has increased. Marketing teams are utilizing corporate videos for brand building, technical experts are reducing time-to-market by making use of videos as the new document, management is driving corporate strategy with executive webcasts, and HR teams are undertaking video training initiatives.

Streaming videos reduce the constraints related to time and space. Organizations must start investing in eCDN solutions that provide a better viewing experience with increased security and more flexibility to acclimatize to changing business environments.

Anindita Sengupta

Anindita is a Senior Research Analyst at G2 specializing in cloud technologies, CAD & PLM software, and web hosting services. With over five years of experience in market research, Anindita has a proven track record of tracking, analyzing, sizing, and forecasting the industrial printer and B2B software markets. Her passion for technology and staying up-to-date with the latest software trends makes her an invaluable asset to B2B buyers and sellers of software. When she's not immersed in market research, Anindita loves to read and explore new destinations, constantly fueling her curiosity and creativity.