Digital West, an Internet connectivity and hosting provider, has signed a new contract with Sockeye Networks, a maker of technology to manage network traffic. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The deal includes Sockeye’s recently upgraded GlobalRoute 3.0 product, which will allow Digital West to direct traffic between its four major Internet backbone providers — Qwest, Genuity, Sprintlink and Global Crossing.
“Before GlobalRoute we had to deal with backbone provider performance problems that affected customers but came and went too fast for us to track them down,” said Josh Richards, Digital West’s CTO.
From its data center in San Luis Obispo, Calif., Digital West serves customers world-wide, from single small office/home office clients to international hotel chains.
The GlobalRoute service uses software to analyze data from geographically dispersed servers to map the lowest-cost, best-performance routes for voice, data and video content.
That’s important for communications providers and enterprises, especially those who subscribe to two or more Internet services providers, a practice known as multi-homing.
With intelligent routing, users can cut costs by sending non-mission critical data over lower-priced Internet service providers and reducing networks engineering tasks. In addition, they can better guard against denial-of-service attacks by moving traffic to unclogged lines.
“GlobalRoute’s ability to wring performance, business continuity and cost advantages for Digital West is a great proof point for how service providers can leverage GlobalRoute for competitive advantage,” said Valerie Marks, Sockeye chairman and CEO.
The privately held company’s equipment is installed at the customer’s IT center. Sockeye’s montly management fees start at $4,000.
Sockeye, a Waltham, Mass., spinout of Akamai Technologies, competes with Opnix, Radware, netVmg, RouteScience and Proficient Networks, among others. There are also rumblings that Cisco is considering entering the market.
