Since its inception, one of the toughest challenges NS1 has faced is the simple fact that DNS is a mature market category with venerable and well-established incumbents. When Kris Beevers and his two co-founders started the company, quite literally every company and internet user already had some form of DNS technology in place. It’s a decades-old technology after all.
Beevers and everyone associated with the company is keen to point out time and again that NS1 isn’t a DNS vendor, but rather a suite of products offering application and traffic delivery, performance and reliability. NS1 in its early days had to constantly preach that message and educate its potential customers on how its offering provided something different than the incumbents with years of performance history.
Because DNS mostly “just works,” some organizations don’t put a serious amount of thought behind it, assuming that all of the services and capabilities out there are roughly equivalent.
In the first two parts of the EC-1, we looked at the origins of the company and its core product offerings in DNS and DDI. In this section, it’s time to look at the broader market and the competition facing NS1 and what that portends for the future of the company.
Everyone owns a product they don’t fully understand
Hosting providers typically offer basic DNS services that “just work” out of the box, creating a large challenge for any vendor in the managed DNS space. Eric Hanselman, principal research analyst with S&P Global Market Intelligence, said that among some organizations, there is an expectation that DNS is just part of what happens on the internet.
“I think the largest misconception that I find about DNS in general, is the lack of understanding of how critical it is to the performance and the customer experience of just about everything that organizations do today that is technology related,” Hanselman said.
