Editors’ note

Before establishing ChinaCache, Wang Song worked for GPI as the Chief Representative of China. Before that, he was a senior advisor for Boston Technology. In addition, he spent 10 years working at North China Institute of Computing Technology.

Company Brief

ChinaCache (www.chinacache.com) was established in 1998 and within 10 years the company has successfully become a leading provider of professional content delivery network (CDN) service in China, providing customers with an all-in-one solution to promptly distribute network content. In 2007, ChinaCache officially opened its North American office in California to facilitate the CDN service needs to and from China and to promote business partnerships with technology and service providers.

Companies like Google, MSN, MySpace, and Facebook have been providing Internet users a variety of services while achieving a great deal of success. As the biggest CDN business service provider in China and in Asia, and having been in this business for over 11 years, how would you describe the progress made by ChinaCache?

It is a great honor for ChinaCache to provide services to superstar companies like Microsoft or MSN. One of the distinguishing features of CDN companies like ours is that we provide “special delivery” services to hundreds of companies all over the world, but very few Internet users know that we have anything to do with the Web site they are using.

But with the popularity of CDN in China, especially in recent years, the Internet is developing at an increasingly fast pace, and many people are starting to notice that CDN is a significant force in the Internet world. Because of that, more and more companies have participated in this business. As the first professional CDN service provider in China, ChinaCache is becoming more widely known by the public by leading the CDN business. At this point, ChinaCache occupies more than 60 percent of the market share in China.

The 2008 Olympic Games in China marked the first time the Olympic Games authorized full use of the Internet relay. There was a massive network flow, centralized Web site visits, and a huge amount of video, making the challenge an unprecedented one. As the biggest CDN provider in China, ChinaCache provided CDN services to CCTV, Sohu, and other iWeb sites. Due to our great network, protocols, usage experience, and resources, together with the full integration of all our resources, we ensured that 32 million Internet users could watch the Olympic Games freely online.

In the past two years, one of the most important things about the Chinese Internet is that the national leaders of China have started to chat with the public through the Internet. In 2008, President Hu Jintao of the People’s Republic of China chatted with the public through Xinhuanet, and in 2009, Prime Minister Wen Jiaobao utilized interactive video communication. Both of these events drew the attention of billions of Internet users. It has been reported that Prime Minister Wen Jiaobao’s interactive video communication lasted for a few hours, during which time there were one billion recorded page views, and millions of netizens communicated with the Prime Minister. As this activity’s CDN service provider, ChinaCache facilitated all kinds of CDN services including Web pages, bulletin board services, netizens’ question interfaces, live webcam broadcasting, and so on. Our CDN live broadcasting service was thoroughly tested by this activity, and proved that it can provide perfect “zero error” service.

The Internet has changed the world, but your philosophy is that “we changed the Internet.” On what basis do you make that statement?

In the Internet field, there is something called the “eight second” theory, which states that if a user has to wait for a Web page to open for more than eight seconds, more than 30 percent of them will choose not to wait. According to the data, Internet problems such as a slow network or even the inability to connect at all, cause a loss of business each year of $4.4 billion.

ChinaCache is trying to raise people’s interest in the Internet by improving the user experience and by shortening the wait time. For years, we have been aiming to help Internet users in China launch Web sites in the shortest amount of time.

In recent years, video Web sites and social network service Web sites are becoming more and more popular, electronic commerce is developing rapidly, and as a result, many Web sites are facing the problem that their response speed for their visitors has reached a bottleneck. ChinaCache utilizes professional CDN techniques to provide our clients with reliable, high performance, safe CDN solutions. Our effort is changing the Internet.

Do you agree that entrepreneurial spirit and innovation are the key factors to the world economic revival?

I completely agree with that. For a company, innovation is a major tool for survival and growth in the marketplace, especially when the economy is in recession. ChinaCache is focused on improving its internal processes. Innovation is very important to ChinaCache. We adjust our production line to adapt to changes in the outside environment. ChinaCache has the biggest CDN development team in China. We also pay a lot attention to personnel training, especially in the technical area. We co-founded technical labs with Tsinghua University and the Central China Institute of Technology. These institutes can provide us with talent that already has actual working experience and we can provide them the best and the most advanced experimental base. The lab we co-founded with Tsinghua University is one of the most successful examples. Most of the team members are postgraduate students or doctoral students who majored in computers or other relevant subjects, and their main job is to develop streaming media products. The streaming media products they developed ensured the successful video transmission of the 2008 Olympic Games. These products were severely tested by the overloaded network flow, but we were still able to give our network users the best user experience.