Who Is Dell Daring By Venturing Into Content Delivery?

Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) wants to make the most of the content delivery systems boom, stepping into a market already populated by Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO), Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU), IBM (NYSE:IBM), and Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC).

The Texas-based company has announced the launch of Dell Deliver, a central management portal built on its servers and networking products and using software from EdgeCast Networks and Elemental Technologies. EdgeCast competes with the likes of Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ:AKAM) and Limelight Networks (NASDAQ:LLNW).

Dell says its solution will let content carriers, struggling to handle the growing amount of IP-based network traffic, monitor their delivery network. It will also let administrators control resources and provide automated analytics that tell operators what content is more popular than others. Dell Deliver uses servers powered by Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) processors and highly parallel Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) graphics cards.

Content delivery systems ease the load on the infrastructures run by network carriers that are under pressure from the demands for rich media. According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Forecast, there will be 15 billion network-connected devices, including smartphones, tablets, and notebooks, by 2015. The number of Internet users around the world is likely to grow to 3 billion, and predictions are that more than 90 percent of all traffic will be video.

“It’s really bringing the networks to the point of breaking,” Dell’s Chad Andrews told eWEEK. Dell is working on other solutions for the space to be launched later in the year, he added.

Dell Deliver will be demonstrated in Las Vegas next week.