Mobile boom creates network speed bumps

Blue Coat has been focusing its efforts around video, which it sees as the next wave of content to replace “legacy traffic” on the SIF and MAPI protocols.

“Either learning management systems, live streaming or on-demand video, it’s becoming a large proportion of traffic,” Mitroo says. “It’s becoming more important for how organisations scale and cater for that growth in video traffic.”

The vendor has made several announcements around WAN optimisation including an update of the operating system and a new appliance that delivers gigabit throughput for data centres.

Blue Coat has invested more in its marketing strategy and brought on board a dedicated network optimisation solution manager.

The change in strategy recognised the opportunity in the market and was to answer the call from customers and partners,” Mitroo says. Hackney is convinced that virtual desktops and applications will “take over” from the client- server status quo because of the superior user experience. “From my own perspective the management benefits and the reduction in costs stack up. I no longer lug my laptop from the office. The flexibility of the virtual desktop allows me to access it from my iPad.”

Hackney says he doesn’t see SaaS applications driving massive amounts of traffic. But he does see the cloud leading to a returned focus on quality of service for networks. WAN optimisation grew out of quality-of-service demands eight years ago before it was replaced by acceleration and bandwidth management.

Now that SaaS is becoming mission critical, quality of service is coming back into vogue, Hackney says.

“I need to tell the difference between traffic going to Facebook and traffic going to Salesforce.com.”

Citrix is releasing version six of its WAN accelerator Repeater with application-level quality of service technology, brought across from an earlier acquisition, Deterministic Networks. “Being able to differentiate SaaS applications from other traffic is one of the key reasons we’re going down that path,” Hackney says.