Winter Park, FL-based Highwinds, a provider of CDN services, has raised a big $55 million round from General Catalyst Partners and Alta Communications. The company will use the funds to build out its RollingThunder network, as well as a new partnership between them, Digital Rapids Corporation and Knack Networks to provide IPTV services. Release.

Dan Rayburn: “While most CDNs are all going after the same customers, Highwinds is taking a different approach by going after those who want to resell content delivery services to their own clients. To date, most CDNs either don’t have a reseller program at all or their tool sets don’t support resellers properly. Resellers need products that allow for sub accounts, reporting based on multiple directories, self provisioning and many times custom branding. To date, most CDNs don’t deal with resellers well, don’t have the proper customer support for resellers or don’t have the tools to allow for a lot of the specifics resellers need. For me, the real question is whether or not there are enough resellers out there to really scale a business past $30-$40 million a year in revenue.”