To make the assessment, we’ll start with the Overall Company Spend, which you’ll find next to the company name on a company report:
Nike’s overall company spend is in the highest tier: Tier A, which starts at $500K/month. If you click on the spend, you’ll see an estimate of 2.8M as the spend. This indicates that Nike operates a significant amount of infrastructure in order to handle their web strategy & traffic demands.
Below the spend is a chart depicting the distribution of traffic around the globe. Many companies will have 0s or -s in regions, but with a company like Nike, we see a relatively even distribution around the globe. This means they will need service providers that can provide strong cloud solutions in these regions. As you know, most providers aren’t going to be strong in every region, which leads to a likely multi-vendor strategy by Nike.
Key Takeaway: Nike is an incredibly large digital presence around the globe and spend a lot of money on services to keep it alive.
Now that we have a good sense for the size of Nike’s cloud footprint, we will look under the hood to understand the cloud service providers that are keeping Nike’s footprint online and running at maximum capacity.
Starting with the Overall Category Spend, we see Nike spends the most on CDN ($100K) and Hosting ($500K). This backs up our assessment about Nike having a significant global operation.
Nike requires a heavy investment in CDN to meet the e-commerce demands, and to power their famous media machine.
The high spend in Hosting signals they operate many entities, which could be subsidiaries like Converse, various community websites, and multi-national versions of their proper sites.
If we dig further into CDN, it’s clear that Akamai is the largest provider. Akamai likely supports Nike proper and their main entities. Since I’m a CDN sales rep, I’m hoping to break in and get a slice of their spend. It’s highly unlikely that I can dismantle Akamai so I need to analyze how the other providers are being used.
Key Takeaway: Nike spends a fortune on Hosting and CDN, which isn’t a big suprise considering their brand, and Akamai is the primary machine behind the CDN.
We now have a good sense of service types, and the providers that Nike relies on. Since I’m hoping to break into a smaller segment of Nike’s CDN strategy, I want to see how the smaller deployments of CDN are being used: Fastly, CDNetworks, and Varnish.
By clicking on Varnish, Intricately shows us the hostnames where Varnish is being used. Varnish is currently powering the niketalk.com entities, which is a community for shoe collectors. This is the perfect opportunity for me to try and displace a current provider, and I will use this in my prospecting efforts to Nike.
Key Takeaway: By clicking into the providers, we can learn a lot about how one is being used, and uncover great opportunities.
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