Shortening the Sales Cycle and Closing Deals Faster

BaishanCloud is an independent Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider with over 450 global points of presence, including over 300 in China. BaishanCloud’s core strength is their ability to deliver the content of their 500+ in the fastest and most secure manner possible.

BaishanCloud depends on Catchpoint to:

Manage performance validation of their global network during the sales process.
Conduct active testing of their infrastructure to identify latency, peering issues, and other performance degradations.
Determine root causes of performance issues within their network.
Assess performance capabilities of new internet service providers (ISPs) before bringing them online.

Employees:

500-1,000 employees

Revenue:

$5.9 Million

Headquarters:

Bellevue, WA

Industry:

IaaS

The performance reports from Catchpoint are very detailed, and help us as well as our customers get a concise view of why we are a trusted CDN provider for China and Asia. One of the important parts of the sales cycle is to provide the customer with a trial and share with them a performance report from Catchpoint. This has been very useful in shortening the sales cycle and pushing for a faster close on the deal.

Darshan Vinnakota

Director of Sales

Problem

Like other CDN solutions, BaishanCloud provides its customers with accelerated content delivery by placing their PoPs as physically close to their customers’ end users as possible, thereby reducing latency and improving the performance of those customers’ websites and applications. This is especially important when delivering content to Chinese end users, as issues with peering and reliability of the existing infrastructure on the ground makes it diﬃcult not only to deliver the content, but also to get an accurate performance assessment.

Additionally, in order to prove that they oﬀer the best CDN solution to potential customers, BaishanCloud requires a neutral third-party tool which shows not only an unbiased view of the performance capabilities oﬀered by their solution, but can clearly illustrate detailed performance metrics of their entire network.

Ultimately, BaishanCloud selected Catchpoint's digital experience observability solution to do the trick.

Solution

With Catchpoint’s powerful analytics engine and widespread global observability network, BaishanCloud is able to show snapshots of a prospect’s performance as it currently stands, and how it would improve by bringing their CDN solution into the fold. These before-and-after performance charts are instrumental in demonstrating BaishanCloud’s value proposition, as well as how they compare with the competition in diﬀerent areas around the globe.

The Catchpoint observability network is crucial to this exercise, as more than 600 PoPs are located in over 80 countries around the world – including more than 50 in mainland China – and feature a wide variety of perspectives and ISPs from which to test. With backbone, wireless, and last mile observers at their disposal, covering both IPv4 and IPv6 protocols, BaishanCloud can choose the scope and type of active testing that is most relevant to the prospect, thereby oﬀering the most accurate view of how their real-life performance will be.

In doing so, Catchpoint has become an integral part of the BaishanCloud sales process and helped close deals with new customers because of the level of granularity and accuracy that it provides.

Beyond their validation eﬀorts, BaishanCloud also leverages Catchpoint’s active observability capabilities to run regular tests of their global infrastructure. The Waterfall reports generated by these tests help their network engineers identify which part of the network might be performing poorly, at which point they can drill down into speciﬁc geographies to identify the root cause of latency, peering issues, packet loss, etc.

Results

By combining the test results based on diﬀerent metrics, cities, test types, ISPs, etc., BaishanCloud’s network engineering can get a comprehensive view of their performance and then share those results via the public URL feature with other internal teams or third-party providers to illustrate the root cause. This is particularly helpful when testing dynamic content, as the multiple steps involved are easily handled by the Catchpoint transaction recorder.

BaishanCloud is also heavily invested in growing their global network, with 65 percent of their manpower devoted to research and development of new capabilities and PoPs around the world. However, adding a new ISP to their network comes with uncertainty over how it will perform in conjunction with their other PoPs and ISPs, so the engineering team conducts active observability tests of the new provider to compare it to the existing ones and determine if it will be able to improve the service delivery of the CDN.

These diﬀerent active observability methods have not only helped the BaishanCloud team conduct development optimization as they grow, but also to identify and troubleshoot performance degradations much faster since bringing Catchpoint on board as part of their network management processes.