Dees Blog

Looking for faster WAN and SaaS access? The solution may well come from a WAN optimization solution. Don’t worry if you can’t lay out all the cash now, Carriers are aligning themselves with equipment vendors to offer WAN acceleration as a managed service which could lower capital expenditure costs for enterprises.

WAN optimization technologies from vendors like Cisco, Riverbed, Juniper, Blue Coat and others offer the promise of reduced latency and overall better bandwidth utilization for applications. As enterprises continue to seek out ways to do more with less, WAN optimization is a market that is projected to reach $1.2 billion in revenues by 2010.

“Certainly in today’s market with the financial conditions we’re experiencing, most people would support the idea that a large contingency of the end user community are looking for alternatives to large scale capital expenditures,” Randy Schirman, Riverbed’s VP of service provider business, told InternetNews.com.

Another key reason, why managed services are perceived to be attractive is a growing resource skills gap at enterprises as companies continue to downsize staffing.

“If they ‘enterprises’ don’t have the necessary people, processes and tools needed to manage the systems on an ongoing basis, it can often be cheaper to engage a managed service provider (MSP) rather than build these capabilities themselves,” Will Scott Cisco’s director of service provider marketing, managed business solutions told InternetNews.com. “In addition, from a cost perspective, managed services often include the underlying technology, processes and people as part of a predictable, monthly recurring charge - allowing the end user to adopt and consume the wide area network (WAN) acceleration technology as OPEX rather than CAPEX.”
Filling a Global Need

Service providers like NTT, Verizon, AT&T, BT, Telestra and Telus are now offering Managed WAN optimization services that include hardware from network equipment vendors. In the case of NTT America they use equipment from both Riverbed and Cisco to offer to customers. The reason why carriers like NTT offer managed services is simple, it’s something else that global enterprises need and will pay for.

“Compared to an in-country network, in global applications longer latency affects application performance and throughput issues are sometimes attributable to latency, not the bandwidth,” Stephen Bloom VP for business development at NTT America’s Arcstar Business Unit told InternetNews.com. “It is always important to design network and bandwidth to fit customers’ business requirements. Having the Managed WPA (WAN Performance Accelerator) enables us as a global network provider to offer enterprise customers an optimization of the global network.”

Bloom argued that by going the managed service route for WAN optimization, enterprises get one stop Global WAN operation including acceleration devices. At the core though, it is continuing demand for more bandwidth and greater operational efficiency that is driving the need for WAN optimization technologies, managed or not.

“First of all, the size of data or file exchange in business has continuously grown in the past few years,” said Bloom. “The most significant change is that as a result of consolidation and centralization of services worldwide, the traffic that goes through customers’ global WAN dramatically increased. The overall increase in communication traffic that goes through global WAN expands the market.”

For Juniper Networks, there is another driving factor that is pushing enterprises toward WAN optimization technology and it has to do with the types of applications that enterprises are now using.

“As Web 2.0 and SaaS usage proliferates, the requirement of optimizing SaaS traffic using Web-Acceleration becomes critical to enable an enhanced end-user experience,” Ravi Medikonda, director of marketing for Juniper’s service provider business, told InternetNews.com. “We see a great market potential for web-acceleration, growing in conjunction with the SaaS market.”
Barriers

There are however a few potential barriers to adoption for Managed WAN optimization.

“In any emerging, new technology or service area there are always barriers to adoption - with most of these naturally overcome as the market grows and matures,” Cisco’s Scott said. “Our enterprise marketing programs and teams look to educate enterprises on the benefits of managed services and to articulate the benefit of working with a service provider who offers these services.”

Lack of awareness of the impact WAN acceleration is another issue. It is however an issue that can often be dependent on individual circumstances and specific application environment tuning.

“Customers can only see the effect of WAN acceleration after they deploy it in a real customer environment,” NTT America’s Bloom said. “This is one of the factors that makes the customer hesitant to go with the solution.”

Bloom added that try before you buy as well as consulting and performance tuning can be offered to help overcome that issue.

Yet at an even deeper level, the same economic factors that might be driving enterprises toward managed WAN optimization solutions might well also be keeping them away.

“A lot of folks are taking a cautious view right now as they look at the world markets, ” Schirman said. “We’ve seen numbers of companies reporting that they show concern and caution about the customer’s ability to spend. Probably more than anything right now that’s probably the biggest concern. The economy and its impact on the customer mindset could cause people to defer or delay decisions for the time being.”

“Don’t you just adore being a mommy?” is a familiar refrain. “Life is all sunshine and rainbows once you have this sweet creature in your life.” The truth of the matter is, you have been trying not to pull your hair out every night. While sweet and adorable to everyone else, babies are a major challenge for the people who actually live with them: the parents. Hours of listening to your baby cry makes one thing quite clear. Babies don’t wait to be fed, changed, or put to sleep. You’ve been told a million times to start using those swaddling blankets you were given, but you’re feeling overwhelmed. What is a parent to do?

The obvious answer is just to be as patient as you can. Babyhood sometimes seems like it will never end, but your little one will eventually grow up. The more in tune you can be with him or her, the more quickly you can soothe the crying. When you can discern the difference between hunger cries, tired cries, and just plain fussy cries, you can respond accordingly. This may take a while to pinpoint, but it is worth the effort. Listen closely when your baby cries, and pay attention to what specifically calms the fussing. When you discern what seems to calm a particular type of cry (large receiving blankets for example), keep that in mind for next time.

Mothers tend to be the experts at interpreting their baby’s cries for help. All sexism aside, mothers do seem to have a special intuition with their babies. That is the beauty of having two parents! Mothers, you can help your husbands feel more involved by sharing what you have learned about your baby’s attempts at communication. When you have figured out some effective ways to stop your little one’s crying, make sure to share your findings with your husband so he can gain confidence with him or her. And break out your little blankets for babies so you can show your husband how to tightly wrap your baby in that. Now if your mother-in-law visits and intones, “Look at that perfect little baby!” you and your husband can share a smile, and agree.

Yesterday, we spent about three hours trying to convince a client of ours that brand new computers just don’t come equipped with the all things that most computers and laptops , need in a PC. We tried to convince him that a fully functional computer is one that is personalized with specially selected hardware and software accessories - and that the computer purchased at the store doesn’t come with these things. Unfortunately, all of our convincing was to our avail. Our client insisted that he should never need more than what came with his boxed product and that we were just trying bilk more money out of him.

Most PC consultants say it’s our job and mission to make sure our clients are 100% satisfied when they walk out our offices. But our job is unnecessarily made harder when people don’t take the time to learn about computer accessories and familiarize themselves with the limitations of store-bought computers. Hopefully by the time you finish reading this article, you’ll understand the lesson that we were trying to teach our client: “What comes out of the box is really just a starter kit.”

The typical computer package comes with a CPU unit, keyboard, mouse, and speaker set. That may be just fine for some, but most people require more than that especially in today’s “connected” society. Today’s users require full multimedia capabilities, a wide range of graphics tools, and accommodations for the various portables we now enjoy. These extras aren’t included with “what comes out of the box,” and the only way to get them is to accessorize.

To illustrate the importance of accessorizing, we like to use the “plain dough” analogy. Let’s say that a brand new computer is a batch of plain dough - waiting to be flavored and baked into something useful. If we want to use this dough to make a delicious batch of chocolate chip cookies, we would need to “accessorize” this dough with chocolate chips and a little brown sugar. If we want to use this dough into in a warm loaf of sesame seed bread on the other hand, we’d need to “accessorize” the dough with yeast and sesame seeds.

Like “plain dough,” the brand new computer isn’t very useful by itself. It needs accessorizing.So do most laptops.You must add accessories too.One of our favorite brands we tell others about is Compaq laptop computers as alot of the most desired softwares are included in their laptops and PCs.

Depending on what’s needed, accessorizing doesn’t need to be expensive. In fact, you can get away with paying a minimal amount for extra software and hardware if these accessories are for children. It’s when these accessories are work requirements or when they’re needed to produce works of quality for any other reason that they can become rather expensive. And this expense applies to microphones, digital cameras, PDAs, scanners, video cams, and more.

Regardless of cost, it’s important to understand that accessories can become “necessities,” and that the best time to get them is the moment you buy a new computer. Waiting too long to accessorize can cause more problems than necessary because while you wait, manufacturers continuously develop new technologies - technologies that your computer won’t be able to accommodate in the future. Once you’re ready to accessorize, the new products on the market are too advanced for your computer and they just won’t work. This is a typical problem experienced by those who want to use hardware designed for Windows Vista on a Windows XP or Windows 2000 machine.

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