Talking WAN optimisation

WAN optimisation is designed to accelerate the response of applications accessed by distributed enterprise users. Technology used included eliminating redundant transmissions, staging data in local caches, compressing and prioritising data and streamlining chatty protocols. Initially an enterprise play due to the expense of the hardware, WAN optimisation is working its way down into the SME, even the SMB in verticals such as architecture and engineering, as economies of scale and competition reduce the price of the technology.

According to a recent IDC report, the total market for wide area network (WAN) application delivery solutions reached US$670 million in 2006 and will grow to US$920 million by 2011. While these figures are impressive, vendors, reseller and SIs are recording runaway growth in the WAN optimisation market. Riverbed ANZ’s regional director, Steve Dixon said it’s nothing short of a “feeding frenzy. The product has been around long enough and installed in enough organisations that it’s got credibility. Cisco is also talking up its product which is creating a lot of awareness and credibility in the market and we’re going gangbusters.”

This view was echoed by Blue Coat’s country manager, Wayne Neich. “Australia’s one of our fastest growing markets. We’ve seen the WAN optimisation space grow dramatically and that’s because of the tyranny of distance and the high cost of bandwidth in Australia.” While the long distances between major centres and a spread-out population mean that the market opportunity is far larger than in the United States or Europe, Australian conditions are not the only drivers in this market.

According to CEO and co-founder of Exinda Networks, Con Nikolouzakis, “IT budgets are continually being reduced or held at existing levels so IT managers have to do more with less while at the same time there is a strong trend towards centralising applications, servers and standardising operating environments. There has also been huge growth in software update and patch traffic as well as sites such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace etc. People
are also working remotely more often so organisations need to be able to see what’s going on and restrict the bad and accelerate the good such as business-critical applications.”

Dixon said consolidating and centralising infrastructure is one of the foremost projects in every organisation Riverbed or its channel talks to. “They are all trying to find ways of making things cheaper, simpler, more effective, easier to support, upgrade and maintain and having all this distributed equipment in regional offices is militating against this. And there’s also the desire to have a single source of truth. Especially for financial services and professional services organisations, document management and version control are major issues.”

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