Complexity drives move beyond WAN optimisation

A new report launching, the 2013 WAN Management Spectrum, from TRAC Research – a market research and analyst company that specialises in IT management technologies – reveals that enterprises are struggling to manage increasing numbers of applications. The need to control application performance is increasingly driven by moves to align IT delivery with business objectives, to support new strategic IT projects and to provide a clear view of the actual user experience each application is delivering.

The study finds that traditional approaches to static WAN Optimisation are being replaced by enterprises due to their inability to cope with the demands of increasingly complex application environments. Respondents cited a failure to scale to promised levels (56%), to provide adequate visibility into the performance of key applications (49%) and inability to cope with rollouts of new applications (45%) as key drivers for replacing first generation WAN Optimisation solutions.

According to the study, increases in adoption of WAN Optimisation will be driven by the need to support new IT initiatives such as cloud-SaaS applications, big data, virtualisation, real-time applications and increased volumes of mobile computing. This adoption is being supported by a transition to lower cost, service based deployment models. The research shows enterprises are moving to either a virtual appliance (25% currently using the method and 42% planning to) or cloud services (8% currently using the method and 37% planning to) and away from physical hardware deployments.

Bojan Simic, President & Principal Analyst at TRAC Research, comments, “The top challenge for managing network traffic according to our study is controlling new usages like Unified Communications or video, internet traffic, VDI and BYOD.” He continued: “Ipanema's capabilities for dynamic control of application performance are uniquely positioned to address some of the key challenges that user organisations reported in this research. Their technology automatically considers real-time traffic conditions to protect business applications from less critical traffic across the entire WAN. This dynamic control is fundamental for enterprises seeking to achieve maximum benefit from the key technologies that they are deploying over their networks and delivering guaranteed application performance and end-user experience for these technologies.”

David White, President of North America for Ipanema Technologies, added, “We see many enterprises struggling to cope with applications such as enterprise video, unified communications, interactive HTTP traffic and cloud applications, while trying to run a hybrid network including both MPLS and internet.” He continued: “Approaching this challenge across large numbers of sites and complex networks with a static approach to WAN Optimisation is clearly no longer sufficient. Decisions about how network resources should be allocated to applications need to be linked with the priorities of the business, taken in real-time and based on a complete view of everything that’s happening.

Simic added: “Moving beyond WAN Optimisation to achieve dynamic application performance guarantee is a critical step for IT departments seeking to transition from a technical cost centre to the role of advisers that can work with business stakeholders to ensure their users are as productive as possible.”

The report from TRAC Research recognised Ipanema Technologies – the industry leader in network solutions allowing businesses to guarantee their application performance – for its core strengths as Data Centre-to-Branch, Cloud-to-Enterprise and Visibility and Control within the WAN management market. The report goes on to recognise that Ipanema Technologies can support selected use cases in Data Centre-to-Data Centre and Mobile Users.

TRAC's 2013 WAN Management Spectrum Report includes insights from 402 end-user organisations. These enterprises span across a number of different industry sectors, sizes and geographic locations, making use of many different types of applications and IT infrastructures.