What Happens Behind The Scenes When Millions Stream A World Cup Match?

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Welcome to another special episode recorded here in Boston, Massachusetts for the IT press tour, where a group of technology journalists all gather to hear directly from startups and innovators. Innovators that are working on some of the enterprise technology's most interesting challenges. Now Boston just happens to be one of the hosts for the FIFA World Cup. And while England are due to be playing here in the tournament, I've discovered that actually getting hold of tickets requires a budget that might be better suited to a venture capital fund than a tech podcaster and reporter. But like millions of fans around the world, I'll be watching from a screen rather than the stands.

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And this brings us neatly to today's conversation. Because every time you stream a football match, binge watch a Netflix series, or livestream a boxing match, or even buy something online during a Black Friday sale, or open a business application, There is an enormous amount of infrastructure that is working behind the scenes to make that experience feel instant and seamless. And many of those experiences are delivered by content delivery networks or CDNs for short. And they are vast global networks that are designed to to move content closer to users and ultimately reduce delays. Now for years, many organizations relied on a single CDN provider.

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But as digital experiences have become more important and customer experiences have continued to rise, businesses have increasingly adopted multiple providers to improve performance, resilience and cost control. But the challenge here is managing all those networks can quickly become incredibly complicated. And this is where IO River comes in. They are a company that describes itself as the control layer for the edge. And they do this by helping organizations unify multiple delivery networks into a single intelligent platform instead of replacing existing providers.

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Now IO River sits above them, helping customers make smarter decisions about where traffic should go, how performance can be improved, and how services can remain available even when individual providers experience problems. And fresh from raising $20,000,000 this year, the company is helping organizations rethink how content, applications and increasingly AI services are all delivered at scale. So what exactly is edge decoupling? Why are some of the world's largest broadcasters using multiple networks to support major sporting events? And how can a retailer avoid losing revenue when traffic suddenly surges during a major promotion?

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Well, let's find out in my conversation with Rob Clifford, vice president of sales for The Americas, recorded here at the IT Press Tour in Boston. Thank you for joining me on the podcast today. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

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Sure. My name is Rob Clifford. I am the VP of sales for Americas at Isle River based in Boston, Massachusetts. And here we are talking at the IT press tour in Boston, Massachusetts. But let's start with the basics.

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For somebody listening, hearing about you guys for the first time, they've never heard of IO River before. What problem were you trying to solve from the very beginning with the company? I'll use a Boston based metaphor of Staples, and then they had this easy button. It was big marketing for them. IO River has created an easy button for customers to build out Multi CDN.

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And the benefits that customers get from Multi CDN are lower costs of their CDN infrastructure, high availability, right, no outages, and better performance both regionally and globally.

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And I think there'll be many business leaders listening that would have heard of cloud computing, but what exactly is the edge? Why does it matter to everyday digital experiences? Just to help everyone understand what we're talking about here and ensure no one gets left behind.

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Yeah. Of course. You know, I mean, the the edge, I think, has been rebranded from CDN over the past twenty five years. You know, twenty five years ago, it was, you know, Akamai going out, building data centers in infrastructure to get, you know, to get compute closer to consumers. So today, when you stream Netflix from a device or go on any sort of b to b application, you know, that's being served up to you in a performance and available way.

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And you describe IO River as almost a control layer for the edge. In plain English, what does that mean? Yeah. So we sit the traffic stays on the CDNs.

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Yeah. We sit on top of it, and we really do three things. You know, the first is the first is steer the traffic. So at the highest levels, you know, we give our customers very granular ability to steer traffic based on cost, performance, and availability, all benefiting their customers. The second layer of our platform is the unified management.

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Doing this is very, very hard. We have experts. Our our our founders ran the core and edge platforms at Akamai for many years. We have a lot of edge expertise, and we've written a single taxonomy and integrated with over 15 CDNs all around the world to be able to do all the management very simply in a single place. And the third is application services.

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Just like folks wanted to bring the infrastructure close to the edge, security practitioners are doing the same today. So we're actually bringing security edge functions like WAF and bot and API security to that edge level.

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And just to bring to life just what we're talking about here, if we go back in before IO River existed, how many enterprises were managing multiple CDNs, multiple edge providers, and and what frustrations did they have as a as a result of that?

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Yeah. I think I I I led the the North American sales team for NSOne ten years ago, and we were out evangelizing this use case. We're evangelizing multi CDN because we had a product that could facilitate it. And, you know, as I mentioned, every customer said, yeah. I want the benefits.

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I want those business benefits, but it's a really hard problem. So the the biggest the biggest streaming companies and web companies in the world threw Bodies Edit. They have teams and teams of people, you know, in the the tens to twenties, thirties, 50 people running this infrastructure very manually. As you took a little step down, people say, you know what? I it's too hard of a problem.

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I don't have the budget. I'll assume the risks of staying on

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a single edge provider. And I often hear people talk about this industry because it's so complex that you almost building an air traffic control system for the day. I mean, is that a fair analogy? And if so, what are you controlling? It's it it it is fair.

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You know, we we're we're we're giving our customers the ability to leverage more CDNs to fly to more airports, and to be able to steer traffic, you know, very granular, based on their needs. You know? Some of our customers care only about cost. Others, you know, about performance and availability. You know?

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I've never had a customer say, I don't want I don't want those three things, but I often, you know, will ask prospects, you know, how would you stack rank those threes those three? Because we give you a platform, that air traffic control panel, to be able to get those benefits.

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And you've had a great year. I mean, at the very beginning of the year, you raised $20,000,000. Six months later, how's that investment allowed you to do that maybe wasn't possible before? You probably had a list of to dos, nice to haves, etcetera. What what's that investment meant to you?

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Yeah. I mean, first, we've grown the team.

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Yep. That that was you know, frankly, I started last fall as as as part of that investment. So we've grown the team specifically here in North America. We've also invested in our engineering team and, you know, to to really get, you know, both our our engineering even more advanced to serve the biggest customers in the world, but also build out our go to market. Right?

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We are we're going to market directly, but also with big, you know, channel and OEM partners, you know, that that take dollars to do so.

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And one of the phrases I've heard a lot today is edge decoupling. And again, for for people listening, maybe a CIO or a CTO, just explain what that is and and why they should care about it as well.

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Yeah. I think what we're doing, which is, you know, I I always tell my my reps, look for unique differentiation. You're the only people doing it. You know, we're the only people running application services on multiple edge platforms. So more more specifically, we are if you were an Akamai shop and you wanted you had some dynamic traffic, you wanted to have a web application firewall at the edge, you probably bought Akamai's.

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If you wanna go multi CDN, you you know, you you bring it in Fastly, you're gonna use Fastly's WAF. Being able to you know, you could kinda stitch the rule sets together and fake it, but but at its core, the engines are different. So your security team, you know, if you're the the CTO, your security team is less than pleased with that security posture. You know, what we're doing is decoupling that. We're decoupling the delivery of the traffic from the security and partnering, like, you know, with with tier a security companies.

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That's that's all they do to be able to have a single engine, single security posture at the edge for any stream of traffic so our customers can can deliver traffic based on their business needs.

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And every day here on this Daily Tech Podcast, I always try and demystify technology, put in a language everyone can understand, and then almost always bring it to life with a real world example. Now, we're recording this today in Boston, and we've got the FIFA World Cup about to start. England are playing Ghana here as well. I know your founder's got tickets. Do you have tickets?

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I don't I don't have tickets. Oh. We'll be we'll be watching.

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But maybe we could bring to life what we're talking about here with the World Cup example that you shared today. What role does IO River play when millions of fans all trying to watch a game at the same time?

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Yeah. In in a in a major geography in Europe, you know, there's only so much infrastructure that these CDN providers can can use. So the big broadcasters have to reserve infrastructure from from different CDNs to assure there's no issues with with the with the stream. What we're doing is is providing that multi edge benefit for the broadcaster to make sure that, you know, there's no availability and they get the best performance for the for the streams, both live and

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on demand. It's incredibly cool. And, of course, that's just only one area. I know hospitality, retail, gaming, etcetera, is also in your wheelhouse. So let's say I'm a retailer heading into Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

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What should happen behind the scenes if traffic suddenly surged because I have a red hot deal? And and how would Io River maybe help keep my site available? Yeah. It's funny. You know, we hear about these global CDN outages a few times a year.

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Right? Cloudflare had a couple blips.

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Fastly, Akamai, Azure, they they all have little blips globally. But every week, and we have this visibility on our platform, every week, there are there are availability issues in different locations all around the world. And so what what we give our customers, especially around live events, is the ability to have a setup and have automatic failover in case that there's some crazy spike that, you know, the infrastructure can't handle. You know, we can we can parachute in another provider to to assure that service. And let's say we do have a business leader listening to the podcast today.

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Listen. I've heard these great podcasts, and they can fix this, this, this, and this. They go

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to the OIT department, and the the techies are gonna start asking questions. So I suppose if we were to have a little peek under the hood, how do you do all this? We have a

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lot of expertise. As I mentioned, our founders are from Akamai. We've been working on this problem for four years. I think it's important to note we're not in the path. Right?

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The traffic stays on the CDNs. We are a virtual layer above it that does that that traffic steering for the benefits around cost, performance, and availability. And if we look ahead, AI inevitably changing everything from applications to infrastructure now, how do you see AI reshaping the edge, and and what role do you see companies like yourselves at iRiver playing over the next few years? How do you see that panning out? Yeah.

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I I think we were actually one of our founders is at a Fastly event in London right now, and they they put a graph on the the raise of AI the the increase in traffic in AI traffic just over the past six months. As you know, it is it's exponential. That's only going to put more strain on the different edge edge vendors. It's it's gonna, you know, create some challenges that that we haven't seen. But at our core, we solve the problem the same way.

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Right? We're we're still able to help customers eliminate outages, get better performance, and reduce CDN costs. It's kind

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of ironic that we've come all this way to see you guys. And one of your founders is over at the Fastly event there in Europe. So what what are what are they doing over there? The presentation? What what's the presence like at that event?

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Yeah. It's it's an event for their partners and and their customers, and and they're a they're a big partner of ours. Right? So we're they're they're using that event to to get together and talk about our partnership. Awesome.

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And finally, looking to the future, what excites you? What makes you wanna jump out

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of bed and get up in the morning and and head into the office? What what excites you about everything you're building here and that growth? Yeah. I I think, you

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know, it's only been, you know, six months or so since we've been here kind of spreading the message. What excites me is every every sales call we have, the the is real, our solution solves the problem, and the tech is very good. You know, with with partnerships that that we're developing, I think the this this has the opportunity to become a big, big company to solve big, big problems in the market. And for anyone listening that would like

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to find out more information, get in contact with you or your team, where should they go to find out more information, dig a little bit deeper, and maybe some of those technical aspects too? Sure.

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They can go to our website, www.ioriver.io, or send me an email, rob ioriver. Io. Be be happy to help and point them in the right direction. Awesome. Well, I

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will add links to the web site and your personal LinkedIn as well to let people reach out there. Just a big thank you for sitting down with me today. I appreciate it. Thanks so much, Neil. Now one of the things I enjoyed most about this conversation today was just how it highlighted a challenge that most of us never think about when something goes wrong.

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If we're trying to grab a bargain on Black Friday or tuning into a football game at the FIFA World Cup, when a website becomes available or a live stream buffers or an application slows to a crawl, Our first reaction is usually frustration, if we're honest. But what we seldom see is that incredibly complex network of providers, services and infrastructure that are all operating behind the scenes to keep these experiences running smoothly. And I think it's fair to say, for the most part, we take these for granted. But what ioRiver is attempting to do is simplify that complexity. Rather than asking organisations to commit to a single provider, the company is building a control layer that allows businesses to take advantage of multiple networks while also managing them as a single system.

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And whether it is supporting a broadcaster during a major sporting event or helping retailers survive traffic spikes during holiday shopping periods or preparing infrastructure for the growing demands of AI applications, the common theme here is resilience, flexibility and control. And another interesting takeaway was that broader shift that is happening at the edge, because as AI workloads continue to grow and digital experiences increasingly and digital experiences become increasingly real time, the infrastructure supporting them is now moving closer to the users. And it's this that's creating new opportunities, but it's also introducing new layers of complexity that organizations are challenged with managing very carefully. So a big thank you to my guest and the entire team at IO River for joining me here in Boston and sharing their vision for what they call a decoupled edge future. And again, a big thank you to Philippe and Celine for inviting me on the IT Press Tour to speaking to people like this and helping get their word out.

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But as always, you'll find links to everything we discussed in today's show notes, and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Are you and your organization becoming increasingly dependent on digital services? And presumably, if you are, is putting all your traffic to a single provider, is that still a sensible strategy? Or would a multi edge approach become a business necessity sooner than you might realize? Love to hear your thoughts on this one.

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Techtalksnetwork.com. But it's now time for me to fly back to The UK and watch the World Cup on a screen rather than in the stands here in Boston. I'll speak with you all again tomorrow. Bye for now.