A CDN (Content Distribution Network) works under a simple but effective premise, tried and true by its retail distribution cousin- speed up deliveries by putting products, or in our this case digital content, closer to customers. Amazon is a textbook example of how this works, no pun intended. From their humble beginnings in Seattle, Amazon now has distribution centers around the globe, stocking popular items and allowing for fast deliver to shoppers. This not only increases customer satisfaction, but over time it provides a notable savings in fulfillment costs.

Digital content distribution can benefit from the same model. Rather than putting a file on a server and having users download it from a single source, CDN services intelligently push content to the edges of the network, where the end users are. Here’s why that’s important- just because the internet makes it easy for anyone to ‘virtually’ drive up to your office and pick up a brochure or a copy of a video, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea in practice, especially when you can save the trip for a large number of those customers.

CDN saves time, because media and data files have a shorter distance to travel to reach the end user. In a world where we are bombarded with constant distractions, an extra 30 seconds on a download can be an eternity. Often, it can be the difference between someone staying on your site or going on to the next one.

CDN also saves money. Long haul bandwidth consumption is reduced, and network operations are simplified as compared to dealing with multiple carriers and the associated vendor relationship overhead. CDN adds stickiness to your site, increasing sales as well as revenue opportunities from ad networks and affiliate programs.

NaviSite CDN delivers 25% faster performance than our competitors CDN services. We know that an effective CDN solution is more than cache servers, and we also include the reporting features and version management tools you need. NaviSite CDN covers the entire content delivery chain, and is backed by 16 strategically located high performance data centers. By incorporating CDN into your network service offering, you improve the customer experience, cut costs, and protect other hosted services by offloading high traffic downloads from your primary application servers.

To understand the advantages of virtualization, consider what it takes to add capacity for a typical business office. Here’s the scenario- a wildly successful new product line forces a company to increase personnel by 50 people to handle the additional production volume. Assuming there is room to seat 50 new employees, a tremendous amount of physical infrastructure needs to be purchased, installed, and configured to varying degrees. Cubicles and desks built, phone and data lines run, computers need to be set up, it’s a long and expensive list, and it can take weeks or more to complete the project and put the new employees to work.

For many businesses, this growth can also force a physical relocation. While a measure of success, the prospect of moving to a larger facility often comes at the worst possible time in the lifecycle of a business, taking away focus that should be spent on capitalizing their successes. The successful company that fumbles during expansion is a common but nonetheless true business cliché.

Now imagine the same scenario, but instead of having to measure out floor plans and order desks and computers, you go to your web browser and fire up your MyOffice control panel. You go to the ‘Number of Employees’ field and change it from 100 to 150. You run through a series of check boxes, selecting such options as ’desktop or laptop’, ‘cubicle size’, ‘enable/disable voice mail’, and at the end you click ‘save’ and your new employees are ready to walk in and sit down to work. That’s the power of virtualization.

With NaviSite and VMware services, the emphasis changes from hardware to resources. With rare exceptions, businesses don’t want servers; they want applications to run, with optimal performance and security. In other words, they want resources. This resource based approach allows administrators to add processing capacity, system memory, storage space, and even server instances on the fly. This is incredibly valuable, giving business decision makers the ability to react to new trends and marketing initiatives with unprecedented speed. A new server can take weeks to purchase and install, but a new server instance can be spawned in seconds. It’s a tremendous advantage in a tough economy, slashing total cost of ownership and redefining the concept of rapid deployment.

Virtualization also dramatically reduces the security risks that come from the physical server model. Denial of Service attacks, intrusions, viruses and other malware are generally designed to exploit single points of failure, overwhelming specific interfaces or hardware and software resources. Virtualization effectively counters that by spreading resources out, reallocating them instantaneously and removing exploitable targets. For hackers, it becomes the equivalent of fighting a rainstorm with a baseball bat.

Concepts like Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing aren’t theoretical anymore, they are important aspects of any modern business plan, and virtualization puts businesses of any size in a position to win under this new set of ground rules. NaviSite’s VMware powered service offerings allow businesses to reap these benefits while eliminating the high costs and dangerous risks associated with archaic single server architectures.

Apple resisted ActiveSync support until version 2.0 of the iPhone OS, and it cost them in the business place. Palm hasn’t repeated that mistake, and has made sure that the Pre can easily integrate with Exchange for fast adoption in the enterprise. Users don’t just have interactive on the go access to e-mail, contacts, and calendar information; they also have powerful search and organization tools that only a centralized mail solution can deliver.

As useful as ActiveSync with managed Hosted Exchange is for end users, it’s even more popular with IT professionals. Administration is easy and efficient, backups are automatic, and spam protection and security is rock solid with Exchange. Hosted Exchange is a cost effective solution for centralized communications, and the upcoming Exchange 2010 promises to add even more value with features like unified voice and e-mail boxes.

The Palm Pre is poised to take advantage of a gap in the current smart phone marketplace. The iPhone has a reputation as a consumer device versus a business hand held, a perception solidified by hip, youth oriented marketing. The Blackberry has had a dominant grasp on the business arena, but the Blackberry technology that won those early battles is dated. Blackberry maker RIM badly miscalculated with the Storm, abandoning the fans of a physical keyboard for touch screen users and pleasing neither with a phone that even the RIM CEO admitted wasn’t ready for prime time.

Palm is in a strong position to exploit that misstep. While it has consumer appeal, the Pre is targeting enterprise users. Bluetooth support is robust, with multiple profiles for a variety of devices, and secure wireless connectivity supports multiple authentication schemes. The Pre is currently exclusive to the Sprint network, although with broader 3G coverage than ATT and T-Mobile, that’s not necessarily a problem.

Thanks to built in support for ActiveSync and Exchange server, the Palm Pre is worth consideration for business who already have a managed Exchange solution, or for those who are considering it. With both consumer appeal and business capabilities, the Exchange/Pre combo gives your employees fast, efficient, anywhere business communications in, if you’ll pardon the pun, the Palm of their hands. The Pre has a unique opportunity to claim the top spot as the choice of business professionals, and early adopters stand to benefit as smart phone based Exchange communications become standard operating procedure.