Doing business online in 2014 is daunting.  For the first time since its invention, people now spend more time accessing the Internet through devices that are not PCs.

As a consumer, this has felt like a natural progression.  But for those who are charged with making sure application content is delivered to visitors quickly, efficiently, and error-free, it’s anything but natural.  There are a variety of systems in place to host, optimize, and deliver content, both hardware and software, but few address the specific issues facing the owners of applications today.In fact, the vanguard in delivery tech now includes online businesses themselves.  Amazon, Google,Walmart, Facebook, and others see that their end-users simultaneously expect experiences that are near-instant, fully responsive, and uniformly useful across devices, especially phones and tablets. And rather than wait around for the industry to catch up, these firms are taking it upon themselves to overcome the delivery challenges they face by making acquisitions and developing in-house solutions.Facebook, for instance, has realized that it would encounter problems if it served rich multimedia advertising users on slow connections like 2g and 3g. They are rolling out a feature that allows advertisers to automatically serve different ad versions based on the speed of the individual user’s network connection.For its part, Amazon.com has been a pioneer in developing a mobile experience that provides all the the personalization and ease of use found on their desktop application.  They are able to accomplish this thanks to a delivery strategy that serves static above-the-fold content quickly to let the user begin her experience instantly, while personalized assets and below-the-fold content streams in as it becomes available or visible.  By the time the user can process what’s in front of her eyes and is ready to take action by clicking or scrolling, the content is there.

These approaches and others are reflective of a new model for digital experience delivery.  It’s one that starts with the end-user and works backwards to ensure delivery is tailored to each user’scontext. This “outside-in” methodology stands in contrast to the one-size-fits-all manner of delivery that is still the norm today.  Legacy delivery systems were built for the one-device world.

We cover this trend in detail in our new whitepaper, Beyond CDN: A New Model for Digital Experience Delivery.  It covers the evolution of delivery technology via the CDN industry and recent adaptations in software and hardware, and details how Yottaa’s approach to experience delivery reflects the “outside-in” model. Click below to download.