When we started NS1, we did so because we believed DNS was a tremendously underleveraged opportunity to steer application traffic. For most applications, DNS lookup is the earliest touchpoint for clients and users. In today’s highly dynamic and distributed application footprints, pushing traffic steering intelligence all the way to the “edge’s edge” - DNS lookup - can drive performance, reliability, efficiency, and security with leverage beyond that of any other control point in the traffic stack. But driving traffic steering in today’s application environments - with their global scale and ever-evolving footprints, delivered via an increasingly noisy and complex internet - demands real-time policy automation and hyper granular visibility.
That is what our Pulsar Active Traffic Steering offering is all about. Pulsar enables today’s traffic and application teams to automate steering, at internet scale, constantly and unfailingly, to provide the best global user experiences while balancing other critical operational factors like cost of delivery. At NS1 we will continue to invest aggressively in active traffic steering technologies based on real-user monitoring (RUM) and other data. We are leading in a critical space for the future of the internet and applications, while others that have historically addressed this critical need, like Citrix ITM (Cedexis) have fallen off the pace and wound down investment.
Today we are reinforcing Pulsar’s place as the most innovative application traffic steering technology in the market with a series of announcements:
- Streaming Media & Video: Pulsar’s functionality has been expanded to include support for the unique needs of streaming media and video use cases, which are expected to account for more than 80% of internet traffic by 2022. Today, Pulsar steers and switches across the multi-CDN footprints of some of the largest streaming video producers and most-watched live events in the world.
- Mux Partnership: We’ve teamed up with Mux, a best-in-class streaming video analytics provider, to bring better visibility to streaming content providers and deliver great streaming experiences based on Mux’s data.
- New Pulsar Features: We’re announcing a bevy of enhancements and next-gen capabilities for the most advanced steering requirements of modern traffic and application teams, including: new APIs for traffic steering decisions, features for seamlessly balancing delivery cost and performance while steering traffic, and new features for the most advanced use cases to drive hyper granular Pulsar steering based on customers’ own proprietary data and models.
- Continued Focus on Ease of Use: Every new Pulsar feature is driven by our baseline goal of making the most advanced application traffic technologies accessible to every application team. Pulsar, like other technologies in our Filter Chain, lowers barriers to entry to advanced traffic steering, and eases adoption and operation of modern multi-cloud and multi-CDN application strategies.
Pulsar has quickly taken the leadership position in active traffic steering. While other vendors like Citrix abandon innovation and downsize their traffic steering teams, we’re renewing our commitment to push the boundaries in the space. We’ll continue to deliver on the promise of Pulsar in partnership with our customers, who today represent the most sophisticated traffic teams, most ubiquitous applications, and most widely-consumed content on the internet.
Interested to learn more about our Pulsar announcements today?
*(source:The Cisco VNI™ Complete Forecast for 2017 to 2022)