NaviSite Enters Digital Delivery Business

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October 30, 2006 (8:31 PM EST)

By Laurie Sullivan , TechWeb Technology News

NaviSite Inc. on Monday launched a content delivery service to serve-up digital files to consumers and businesses. The offering expands on the Andover, Mass.-company's traditional applications hosting service with an ability to support large digital files.

The service will support content like games, music, movies, media, medical files, and enterprise applications from companies, such as Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp.

"There are some very specific requirements for gaming," said Doug Mow, NaviSite vice president of marketing. "You have to be at the exact release level of all the other Massive Multiplayer Online Game participants or you can cheat in the game, so when you provide the capability to download the game you also need to level check and make sure everyone is on the same version."

Mow also expects demand to come from enterprise software companies converting hard-coded applications into hosted services under the software-as-a-service model.

Companies are shift businesses models, as more digital content becomes available in everything from medical records to enterprise applications to entertainment media. Traditional vendors are experimenting with all different types of business models, said Susan Feldman, vice president of content and digital marketplace research at IDC.

"Yes, digital media is growing," Feldman said. "But six months from now we'll be exactly where we are today, even more so, meaning there's a spectrum for information packages and we won't settle on one format, or one company to deliver them."

But the road for NaviSite could prove rocky. Expanding into this space pits the company against Akamai Technologies Inc., which leads in the industry for content delivery.

Akamai, Cambridge, Mass., has built a content delivery network that includes Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. as clients. And two weeks ago added to the list the six-year-old Internet TV site SIVOO, which targets ethnic programming to about 60 million U.S. residents that speak a foreign language, said Burhan Fatah, the company's CEO.

The Internet TV network offers up a selection of Spanish and Chinese entertainment programming. "A Hindi-language next network will be up and running within 45- to 60-days," Fatah said. "We expect Akamai to handle about half of the content we deliver to our customers."