Companies that may be holding off on deploying enterprise content delivery networks because of the capital costs involved in getting them up and running have some new options.

This week MCI and Equant separately announced managed eCDN services designed to eliminate big upfront expenditures and give business customers a managed infrastructure designed to handle the growing amount of data traversing corporate networks.

MCI’s software-based service runs Fantastic's eCDN software on IBM Intel-based servers placed on customer premises, and the systems are managed and monitored by MCI. A Web-based portal gives users insight into how content is being accessed and delivered and also enables them to manage the delivery of content and set user access rights, among other things, says Jim DeMerlis, MCI vice president of product management.

The service takes advantage of underlying public or private WAN services and can handle content delivery over frame relay, IP, ATM, Private IP or a private line network, DeMerlis says.

"We are seeing tremendous growth in the size of files for a variety of applications. What was once handled by simple, straightforward Word documents now includes other features such as images or text with speech recording or video and multimedia," DeMerlis says. "That has resulted in larger files and more bandwidth required. Customers are looking for ways to manage and distribute that content between the business and partners or end users."

Equant says it can reduce WAN bandwidth by up to 40% with its new Cache Management service that enables users to retrieve content from a local cache, rather than from remote origin servers. The service uses Network Appliance NetCaches to cache oft-requested IP VPN content, including Web-enabled applications, document files and Web pages. NetCaches are deployed on customer premises, and Equant provides full service management, including continuous monitoring and maintenance, says Simon Abrahams, product manager at Equant.

Analysts say that eCDNs are becoming increasingly important as businesses put more applications and multimedia content on their networks, but that the cost and complexity of deploying eCDNs can be hurdles to business adoption.

"Now enterprises can deploy an eCDN without a one-time capex cost," says Lawrence Orans, senior analyst at Gartner. "The managed services’ monthly charges provide a path for enterprises to 'ease into' an eCDN. And the managed component makes it easier for enterprises to adopt content delivery technology, which many are unfamiliar with."