Embracing Opportunities in the Year Ahead

As we usher in a new year, and my first month as CEO, it’s an opportune time to reflect on 2023 while embracing the potential that 2024 holds for Edgio and the industry at large. I want to start by extending my heartfelt gratitude to the entire Edgio team and our valued stakeholders for their support throughout the challenges we faced together in 2023. It’s safe to say that we’ve had a demanding year, encountering many unforeseen hurdles that tested our resilience as a company; and I am happy to say we came out on the other side stronger in terms of product offerings, customers, culture, and prospects.

We made considerable progress against the strategy and mission we set out in 2021 – to move from a commodity CDN business to an edge-enabled solution provider. We continued to double-down on our Uplynk platform and are proud to boast that we powered over 50,000 live events, managed hundreds of thousands of VOD assets, and distributed tens of millions of server-side ads; all while announcing CMAF, ATSC3, VP9, and enhanced AI metadata capabilities to the core platform. In doing so, we expanded our managed services capacity and expanded our market reach by building out a Media ecosystem of ISVs and global SIs. Uplynk is one of a kind in its ability to be an end-to-end managed service as well as the base platform in a best-in-class broadcast workflow.

We also launched v7 of our application suite. This platform streamlines the DevSecOps workflow, offers a step-function in our security suite, and its launch garnered positive press coverage and huge customer interest. We disrupted the status quo in launching our bundled pricing which provides all-you-can-use CDN with our application and security solutions, so customers aren’t penalized when they experience a DDoS attack. We introduced new growth-oriented application and security solutions that garnered several industry awards and analyst recognition, including a Frost & Sullivan customer value award and the “Overall Web Security Solution of the Year” award from the Cybersecurity Breakthrough Awards.

While awards are great for our ego and our website, they don’t mean much if customers aren’t seeing the value. Thankfully, we believe our customers are. Our pipeline for Applications through Q3 expanded by almost 80%, and churn was reduced to less than one percent. We also announced new customers, including some, like Secure Medical, who switched to Edgio from a competitive CDN offering. The diversity and scope of these customer wins are directly attributable to the breadth of our capabilities and our ability to demonstrably improve performance, operating efficiency, and security. All of this is made possible by the release of Applications v7 in April.

Looking ahead to 2024

2024 is a new year, and while I’m sure it won’t be without its challenges, I am confident in this team, this company, and the value we bring to the market. We’ve already seen some impressive successes executing very large live events with Uplynk– such as successfully streaming the recent college bowl games for one of our clients to more than a million concurrent viewers, without issue. Our security team successfully thwarted an attack against one of our largest telecom clients the day after Christmas within minutes of it being identified. Our WAF (Web Application Firewall) solution was responsible for 2.3 billion blocks in December alone.

I expect Media to play an increasingly significant role in our revenue mix as we scale both our managed services capabilities and continue to evolve the breadth of our Uplynk modularity. We have some customers who want us to manage much of their day-to-day operations for them, and others who desire components of our platform to work within their existing architecture. As such, we are integrating in with the most popular encoding vendors today, building out our ecosystem of CMS and Player partners, all the while investing heavily in offering SSAI/manifest manipulation and playout capabilities as a stand-alone offering. These efforts alone will triple our addressable market and help to optimize our global networks utilization.

We expect to see more advancements come out of our security and threat intelligence team in 2024. We will continue to aggressively add new security features to our application development environment, specifically targeting DevSecOps with threat intelligence services and offerings. Our SOC is already using our distributed edge presence to generate predictive security alerts based on bad actor detections across the globe. In short, we alert our customers to threats more quickly than anyone.

In closing, I believe in the vision of Edgio and our promise of accelerating content delivery, enhancing security, and ultimately boosting overall revenue and business value for our clients. And I look forward to a successful 2024.