Is DIY An Emerging Trend

Is the Do-it-Yourself model the next big trend, a game changer and disruptor of legacy business models? Or is it a blip on the radar and anomaly. Before we answer, lets agree that DIY is much bigger than just CDN services; it encompasses a whole lot more – compute, storage, delivery and security. Apple, Google, Facebook and Netflix built their own content delivery infrastructures so they could deliver a certain percentage of their content. The argument goes that DIY is not a trend, because Apple, Google, Facebook and Netflix don’t represent the industry at large – totally agree on that point.

Furthermore, cost reduction wasn’t the primary driver for their DIY efforts, because content delivery cost amount to pennies on the income statement of these behemoths, if that. The primary driver for their DIY ambitions – to control as much of the “first-to- last mile delivery chain” as possible, because he who controls that controls the customer experience. And leaving the customer experience in the hands of the last mile providers, cable operators and telcos, well we know how the story goes.

Is DIY a trend? Not only is it a trend but its the MotherLoad of all trends, courtesy of the pesky startups we’ll call the “DIY Enablers”. We know of four startups who are pioneering the DIY agenda, and their in the beginning cycle of disrupting everything in sight. By year end, they will have hundreds of customers who generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue. By the end of next year, there will dozens of DIY Enablers who have thousands of customers who are generating hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. And they will be changing the way cloud, storage, delivery and security are bought and sold. So yes, DIY is a monumental trend that’ll change everything.