Cutting-edge ChinaCache at home in science park

 

Wang Song describes ChinaCache as an express delivery company just like FedEx.

But "we do not deliver real commodities - instead Internet content and information such as images, music and video to Web users in a fast, secure and reliable way", the co-founder and chief executive officer told China Daily.

Wang and his team established ChinaCache in 1998 when the Internet just emerged in China.

"It is China's first company to develop in the CDN (content delivery network) sector and we chose Haidian Science Park due to its scientific resources and national influence," said Wang.

ChinaCache now is among China's largest CDN companies after 15 years of development.

The 1,000-employee company has set up over 15,000 servers across the world to provide scalable services to a large number of Chinese and overseas companies.

It now does business in more than 100 cities in Europe, Asia, the United States and Oceania. In China, the industrial giant has had more than 50 percent of the market share for many years.

In 2010 it was listed on the US stock market NASDAQ as the first Asian company in the field. On its first day of trading, ChinaCache stock soared by 95 percent, a record for companies listed in the US since 2007.

Though the company has had outstanding performance, China's CDN development is "lagging far behind some other countries like the United States", said Wang.

He said the company started CDN services in 2000, about the same time as foreign companies, but the industrialization of the sector in China fell behind.

In the US, the CDN market is so mature that nearly 70 percent of Internet content is delivered through the technology, while in China, it's only a little more than 10 percent.

So if China wants to achieve a significant progress in the next 10 years in the Internet industry, CDN services "still have a long way to go", Wang said in an earlier interview.

According to the CEO, CDN services were originally used to accelerate speed and improve the user experience. Now, it has become an important link in the Internet content delivery chain.

"The main customers used to be large website portals such as Baidu and Sina," Wang continued. "Now nearly all kinds of large and small companies need CDN services."

"If the China Daily website was suddenly visited by a large crowd of viewers due to a very interesting report, our CDN service can protect it from crashing," Wang explained.

The company now serves clients in industries ranging from e-commerce to finance and software, media and online gaming.

In addition, since mobile Internet has changed the industry, network bandwidth faces more pressure, which is both an opportunity and challenge for CDN technology, said Wang.

According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China now has more than 800 million mobile Internet users.

In July, ChinaCache announced a partnership with Altobridge, an Irish data optimization company for wireless networks. They will jointly work at delivering new and multi-layered technical solutions for mobile Internet content delivery.