Startup Teridion Says It Can Deliver Internet Up To 20 Times Faster

An Israeli-American startup emerged from stealth Wednesday with a product it promises will drastically accelerate Internet performance.

Teridion, which so far has secured $20 million in funding, is generally releasing a cloud-based solution that boosts speed in both directions by optimizing traffic across global backbone networks.

"The whole concept is the Internet needs a performance improvement. It was fundamentally broken," Dave Ginsberg, Teridion's chief marketing officer, told CRN.

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Elad Rave, the company's founder and CEO, said Teridion's technology delivers Internet performance that can be 20 times faster than what businesses are currently experiencing.

Just to make clear that bold claim didn't require any caveats, Rave added: "When we say that, we mean anything that runs over the Internet is much faster."

Teridion's Global Cloud Network achieves such a result through real-time monitoring of the entire global network of networks -- identifying both green zones through which packets freely flow, and red ones experiencing congestion.

The idea germinated a decade ago after Rave sold his previous startup and became fixated on a problem that just about anyone these days can relate to.

"I saw there was a big problem in the way Internet works," he told CRN. "I have a 100-Megabyte connection at home but I actually only get 10 Megabytes."

Unlike most people dissatisfied with their actual connection speeds, Rave started trying to figure out what was going on. He spoke to colleagues at Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks and Akamai and they all conveyed pretty much the same message: The problem is a result of how the very backbone of the Internet was built -- it is what it is and no one can change it.

"They were right," Rave said. "There's no way to solve it unless you change all of the routers all over the world."

About five years later Rave started a cloud business in Israel. He returned to thinking about the same problem, wondering how emerging cloud technology could be applied to advance networking.

Rave poured his own money into an idea, hiring some engineers to build a proof of concept.

"When we saw it was actually working, to our surprise, we started raising the funds," he told CRN. "We already have paying customers who are using our networking."

Some of those customers include enterprise file-sharing service Egnyte and translation service Lexifone. Teridion is also working with IBM's SoftLayer cloud. The solution is ideal for providers of content, cloud storage, virtual desktops, VoIP and similar services that require fast connections, he said.

Teridion's Global Cloud Network doesn't require customers to deploy any new infrastructure -- no software, no code changes, no devices.

"It's a totally new approach for how delivering personalized, bidirectional content is handled over the global Internet," Ginsberg said.

Rave explained Teridion's technology is predicated on the fact that "routers work independently of other routers. They don't share information."

Nobody really sees the full path from Point A to Point B when they send data, he said.

And that full path often is determined by the principle of "least cost routing," which means your information goes through segments of global networks that are most cost-effective for the providers. Internet businesses have no control over how data flows between them and their clients.

"You hope for the best, but when you get very effective Internet, that's a good day," Rave said.

But Teridion's Cloud Router understands the entire path, from start to finish. By adding a simple DNS integration, customers can too. That means low-latency communications, and no jitter.

"We map the entire global Internet and we understand where are the latencies," he said. "The green paths and red paths. We always give you the best available performance on the Internet."

Rave, who moved to San Francisco upon founding the company, believes in a channel strategy -- his previous cloud infrastructure company only sold through partners.

When he started Teridion, he knew building a strong channel was something the company needed to do early in the process, he said.

Teridion is still working with customers directly, but is also talking to two large solution providers about becoming inaugural partners, Ginsberg told CRN.

"Over the next three to six months, as we establish a direct sales footprint and replicate some of our early success, we'll start working with a small set of sophisticated channel partners," Ginsberg said.

PUBLISHED SEPT. 30, 2015