When Dell (News - Alert) officials canvassed the industry recently, one message resounded loudly from its customers –content management is a serious pain point.

“Content management represents a particularly aggravating pain for customers across telecommunications, media and entertainment, and the problems and pains are being driven by an epic demand for rich media that is being driven by the explosions of smartphones, tablets, IPTV (News - Alert) demand, and gaming consoles –devices that are aggressively pulling content from the networks,” Chad Andrews, vertical strategist for the Telecommunications, Media & Entertainment vertical at Dell, told TMCnet. “This problem is going to get worse; this is a particularly burdensome problem today and every one of the network operators that we deal with is looking for a solution.”

So a solution is what Dell set out to create and today the company introduced its first-ever Content Delivery Platform (CDP) Dell Deliver, a platform which will permit network providers to sell Content Delivery Network (CDN) services to the enterprise as well as manage the on-demand delivery of any video to any screen quickly, efficiently and at low cost. The offering, which officials say will direct network operators down an easier path to CDN ownership, is built on Dell PowerEdge 12th generation servers and software from EdgeCast Networks Elemental Technologies.  and

Available with a number of deployment models, Dell Deliver is built with software from EdgeCast Networks, a CDN that delivers a large portion of the world’s Internet traffic on behalf of more than 4,000 content providers, and Elemental Technologies, a supplier of video processing solutions for multiscreen content delivery. With Dell Deliver in tow, network operators will be able to quickly launch their own CDN and bring a valuable new service to their enterprise customers and support their own video delivery initiatives, according to company officials.

“We are able to address the most immediate pains of the marketplace within the content delivery space by combining our fast, efficient hardware, our world-class CDN management software from EdgeCast Networks and media transformation software from Elemental Technologies,” Andrews told TMCnet of the goal of the release. “We are able to allow service providers to develop content delivery networks quickly at low cost and drive products to market and maintain them much more efficiently then current solutions.”

For Dell, its latest release represents the company’s first entry into the CDN space and commitment to providing the value that its customers need to move video across their networks in a cost effective manner. But Dell Deliver only marks the beginning of this new focus for Dell. Specifically, the release of Dell Deliver today is the first step in a phased approach as the company is looking to develop an ecosystem of partners over time that can help it solve other pain points of customers and also allow partners to monetize the video that is riding on the servers.

But for now, Dell Deliver speaks to a very ubiquitous problem in the industry as network operators are currently “under water,” according to Andrews. They are looking at all the video on their networks that they have to move across the network and are viewing it as a huge burden right now.

“They are not even thinking about how they do something as evolved as making money from that; they are just trying to not lose money from that,” Andrews said. “We can create a core infrastructure that is able to support a profitable foundation for CDN. We said let’s get in there and create a foundation that allows these companies to keep up and from there we will continue to improve the core infrastructure.”

The benefits of Dell Deliver are countless as the offering features streamlined provisioning and a variety of administration and management tools designed to help reduce maintenance and operation costs, according to officials. Other advantages include a central management portal that allows customers to deploy, procure and monitor their CDN in one portal; a multi-tier caching hierarchy that provides automated analytics capabilities to determine what content is more popular and store that content in locations; and faster-than-real-time transcoding of professional grade content with a density far exceeding its nearest competitor.  

One company that was eager to get on board with Dell Deliver was EdgeCast Networks, a CDN that has noticed over time that service providers and big telcos are searching for ways to manage network transfers and drive revenue while reducing costs.

“EdgeCast has seen the shift in the CDN marketplace and early on became the leading software vendor to service and help accelerate the service provider CDN evolution,” James Segil, president and co-founder of EdgeCast, told TMCnet.

“We want to make this shift happen; that’s what I like about this,” he said of Dell Deliver. “What this means for us is validation. Validation that some of the smartest guys in the room have figured this out and are making this transition happen in the industry.”