In a recent newsletter we discussed the 2008 Application Delivery Challenge. Since the challenge contains responses from two equipment providers and a service provider, it's given us the opportunity to revisit the "build vs. buy" discussion. That is indeed one of the choices you can make, as the use of a service provider for enhancing application delivery can indeed be accomplished without any specialized equipment on the customer premises. At the same time, there can be a significant advantage achieved by using premises-based equipment in conjunction with specialized service offerings.

As Andy Rubinson, senior product marketing manager for application acceleration at Akamai, explains: “We’d like readers to consider the optimal end-to-end solution by combining Application Delivery Controllers in the data center with a unique type of managed service in the Internet 'cloud.' This is unique in that we have literally tens of thousands of servers distributed across the globe within one network hop of 90% of the world’s Internet users. These servers provide the equivalent of having application acceleration appliances at both ends of the connection. Additionally, custom software is used to optimize those application delivery bottlenecks best addressed outside of the data center.”

Andy continued: “This complementary approach to Web-enabled applications requires no additional hardware and has the inherent benefits of a fully managed service. Readers should consider this approach as a necessary complement to ADC hardware for Web-enabled applications.”

We’d like to hear from you in terms of your choices for application delivery. Are you leaning more toward installing your own equipment, looking to a service provider for this function, or both? Let us hear from you, and we’ll share the results.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.