The city of Chattanooga Tennessee has deployed its own gigabit broadband network, and over the holiday weekend, industry analyst Craig Settles detailed in two posts just what the community is doing with all that broadband.

In the short term, Chattanooga is applying its new bandwidth for smart grid technologies that help the city save money through reduced power outages. Over the longer term, city officials plan to use their massive data pipe as an economic development engine. Futuristic applications like 3D modeling and high-end simulations are already in the works through government initiatives and through the locally headquartered company SimCenter Enterprises. Here’s how Settles described why a gigabit network is important for this type of work:

“High-end modeling and simulation is a bandwidth hog if you want to loop in people working at other locations into the “what if” process. However, a gigabit network enables a small company in a mid-sized city to become the center of a world of supercomputers, international research teams and corporate giants.”

Lamp Post founders want to use the gigabit network to encourage entrepreneurs

Chattanooga isn’t stopping with SimCenter either. It hopes to woo more businesses with big data dreams through the promise of high-capacity broadband. The local venture organization Lamp Post Group is inviting college students for internships this summer to build gigabit applications and compete for start-up capital. And the local community college started a gaming degree program last fall as part of an attempt to recruit professionals from the gaming industry.

Chattanooga has recognized the advantages of building a foundation on big broadband, and it is seeing first hand how high-capacity infrastructure can drive innovation and business growth. Big broadband supports big data, which in turn opens up big opportunities.

Recently, our VP of Global Services David Frigeri sat down with Network World’s Jim Malone for an audiocast discussion on the next phase of cloud computing. The talk covers market drivers for moving into the cloud, capacity considerations, and how to plan for data and/or systems migration. It’s an excellent exploration of what many companies are facing today in an era of global audiences (consumers, employees, etc.) and distributed infrastructure. Register here, and take a listen to the discussion for free.

There’s been an explosion in both IaaS and cloud computing activity over the last six months, with new players entering the field, and more and more companies recognizing the need for distributed storage and processing resources. It’s one thing, however, to outsource hardware and CPU cycles, and quite another to have those resources provided as part of a managed service. Both outsourcing models exist, but there are still wide gaps in understanding around what specific services are available, and where it make sense to transition from the former model to the latter.

The sheer infrastructure capacity required to support an online business today is enough to force many companies to look outside their own data centers and delivery networks. The fear there, however, is finding an option that meets specific business requirements as they relate to outsourced infrastructure assets. For an enterprise, the worry might be around security and guaranteed uptime. For a media company, it might be around knowing how to manage software issues like media encoding and user authentication on an outsourced hardware platform. In addition, different industries have different major players involved. If there’s any interfacing to be done with one of these third-party industry companies – say a telecom carrier, for example – then an outsourced infrastructure solution has to be provisioned and managed for that scenario.

The bottom line here is that infrastructure outsourcing today – and its offshoot, cloud computing – goes beyond the vision of grid computing a decade or so ago. Managed services can and often should play a key role. In fact, what we may see in the coming months is a growth in specialized IaaS offerings that cater to different industries and business needs. Gigabytes (terabytes, petabytes…), CPU cycles, and bandwidth capacity do not exist in a vacuum. Putting them to work toward a specific purpose is what IaaS offerings should do for the growing legion of web-based companies looking to offload infrastructure management as a non-core business function.

It’s that time again, and in case you missed it, we announced first quarter earnings for Limelight Networks late on Thursday. Here are some of the highlights.

• Revenue of $49.8 million in Q1
• Delivering 2.5 billion objects hourly
• Storage capacity of 11+ PB
• 11+ billion online add impressions served in Q1
• Mobile internet and tablet computing revenue growth approximately 300% year-over-year
• Online video platform growth approximately 100% year-over-year
• Site and application acceleration services growth exceeded 100% year over year

Last week GigaOM hosted a conference in New York on Big Data, a sister event to the annual Structure conference held on the west coast. We were on site for the day, and came away awash in big numbers and big ideas. Certain themes repeated over and over again. The increasing scale and decreasing cost of storage, computer processing, and bandwidth are combining to create a foundation for new applications and new application models. We’re at a major tipping point. It’s not just that we can do things faster. We can approach problems differently because of the new resources we have available.

Taking a step back, one of the ideas the speakers discussed last week was the need for scale-out storage to go hand in hand with greater computational capabilities. The more information there is, the more need there is to process and analyze that data. We’ve always collected information, but until recently we haven’t stored most data in massive quantities. For example, businesses have traditionally only stored security camera footage for a limited period of time. But what if they had stored footage from every moment of every day going back decades? Consider the analysis implications around human behavior, visitor demographics, traffic patterns over time, and more.

And in addition to big data that’s always been available, we also have new data flowing our way. Jeff Jonas, a Distinguished Engineer from IBM, quoted a stat that there are 600 billion transactions a day being created in the US alone based on mobile phone geo-locational data. Storing it all could be useful, but only if we had the ability to provide deep context for the data, and near-real-time analysis.

Which takes us to computation and computational performance. Big data sets require big analysis, and that requires high-performance computing. Our computing capability on individual systems continues to grow, but we can increase that power exponentially by moving to a parallel, distributed computing model. Higher performance isn’t just about speed. It’s about enabling whole new lines of thought. As Jim Baum, CEO of Netezza (also part of IBM) put it last week, if it takes three days to get back an answer to a question, you won’t ask the follow-up question, or the question after that. If you get an answer in three seconds, the dynamic changes significantly.

The implications of big data and big data analysis are astounding in their scale. There are things we’re already seeing implemented today, like real-time language translation and augmented reality apps, but there are also huge opportunities for causal analysis and even prediction engines. What’s the impact of migration on GDP? How do we better predict the trajectory of a disease outbreak? The more data we have, and the more effectively we can process it, the more we’ll be able to discover and apply to our world for better business, and better living. That’s big data in a nutshell. And it’s a big deal.

Want to read more? Here are some of the GigaOM posts covering last week’s Big Data event.

• Reducing Data Latency Leads to Faster Decisions
• Is Big Data Making Us Dumber?
• Big Data Could Be Cloud’s Killer App

There’s more to an earnings report than numbers, and while we were pleased with those numbers in yesterday’s account, there is also an interesting narrative to tell. Limelight Networks has built a globally distributed, high-performance computing platform that we believe is unique in the technology industry. And the solutions that run on top of that platform plug into some of the biggest trends in tech today: online video, mobile content, cloud-based applications, and digital advertising.

To take one example, the explosive growth in smartphones and tablet devices we’ve seen in the past year has led companies to target more content directly to mobile audiences. In parallel, our mobile revenues have skyrocketed. The latest quarterly numbers represent 200% growth for our mobile business year-over-year.

Want more insight? Details on the data? Check out the official earnings release.

Much gets lumped together under the ubiquitous cloud category, but it may be time to start separating out infrastructure services from more self-service cloud offerings. Derrick Harris at GigaOM starts to make this argument by separating managed hosting providers from cloud companies. The primary difference he cites is the customer support angle. Managed hosting providers use SLAs and are services-driven, while cloud providers offer pooled computing resources, but are more self-service oriented.

The reason for separating IaaS from cloud is to create two different sets of criteria for evaluation. This may be more important than ever now as the scope of IaaS continues to grow. Web hosting is only one type of managed infrastructure business. Beyond hosting there’s a whole other realm of services that combine infrastructure and support that are growing in popularity. These include not only distributed storage services, but, increasingly, services that make use of a scalable, distributed platform that can only exist with a broad footprint of infrastructure resources. Web acceleration is one example, but there are others like targeted ad insertion, and sophisticated digital rights management that need infrastructure-based support services and have huge potential to disrupt today’s online industries. With these types of applications, it’s often not just about storage and computing capacity, but how intelligently these networked resources can be made to perform.

It’s the start of a new year, and one in which the practice of cloud computing will continue to evolve as more companies experiment with moving storage, software, processing power, and applications off their own networks and into a system of pooled resources. Rackspace has a new white paper out that provides an introduction to the cloud, with a focus on the benefits of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The three basic financial benefits of cloud computing include economies of scale, a pay-as-you-go model, and the ability to pay for IT functions as part of operating expenditures rather than capital expenditures. However, there’s another key element to measure against the benefits of on-demand capacity: performance.

It may sound obvious, but capacity is only good if the systems it’s being used for are readily accessible; if performance is both superior and predictably consistent. This is where content delivery meets the cloud. What use is outsourced storage if the content isn’t rapidly available? What good is offloading application processing if it causes applications to run more slowly? More and more, traditional cloud offerings are being paired with content delivery services.

In combining cloud with CDN, there are three requirements to consider. In order to provide capacity and performance, a service should include massive storage centers around the world, connections to a large number of last-mile networks globally, and a way to quickly and reliably move data packets between and among storage hubs. It’s global resource capacity plus global network connectivity. Yes, it’s 2011, and the network is the computer.

Last week Limelight Networks sponsored a webinar with GigaOM Pro on the Scalable Cloud. With moderator Derrick Harris, analysts Brett Sheppard and Paul Miller, and our own cloud strategist Jason Thibeault, the panel discussion ranged from defining scale in the cloud, to evaluating use cases, to hybrid clouds, to cloud management and pricing models. Given all of the vague assumptions around cloud services, the ability to hear from experts on real-world considerations was exceedingly valuable. For example, even defining cloud scalability requires a set of assumptions about the audience being addressed. To an IT person, scale means servers, and data centers, and back-up. To a developer, scale means the ability to grow a software application, which means understanding latency issues, computing capacity, and more. Content type also plays a role in scale. Screening the Superbowl poses different challenges than managing an ecommerce site that’s dependent on regular database queries.

And speaking of use cases, one of the big discussion points made during the session was the argument that certain enterprise systems are better positioned for cloud enablement today than others. CRM, HR, finance, and in some cases legal systems work in the cloud because they are, to some extent, detached from a company’s main operations. On the other hand, ERP software and other systems that require a lot of back-end links with a company’s existing infrastructure are more difficult to hand over because of integration issues. In fact, the limitations of enterprise infrastructures are going to continue to exert a push/pull relationship on corporate cloud activity – pushing companies to look for new resources, and pulling companies back because of the IT integration challenges.

One of the issues we’ve talked about here before is the importance of scale for enterprise cloud services. For a lot of businesses, it’s not enough to lease storage space in a data center with an option to add more servers as needed. Many companies need data presence around the world, and the ability to add capacity not just when, but where it’s in demand. Issues of scale cover online delivery systems as well, not to mention support at the application level for feature innovation and audience customization.

With all this talk of scale, we decided to team up with GigaOM to present a webinar on The Scalable Cloud. It’s free, and it’s on November 4th at 1:00 PM ET/10:00 AM PT. Details are below. Join us if you can.

GigaOM and Limelight present The Scalable Cloud, a free, roundtable-style webinar where our panel of experts will analyze key issues in delivering scalable products and services that utilize cloud-based infrastructure. The webinar, featuring GigaOM Pro analysts and industry perspectives from Limelight Networks, will also answer questions from our audience of attendees.

Topics on the agenda:

• Potential points of failure for delivering scalable cloud-based service offerings worldwide
• Key steps to building robust and widely distributed product and service offerings atop cloud infrastructure platforms
• Case studies that illustrate real-world success and failure stories for cloud-based delivery
• How companies are utilizing cloud solutions for data and content storage
• The financial impact and ROI of transitioning to cloud infrastructure for business and consumer service offerings