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.”
When it comes to the inhibitors, these have greatly reduced – to nothing according to some vendors – as the technology has moved beyond the early adopter stage and started to gain mainstream acceptance. F5 Networks managing director, Chris Poulos, is extremely upbeat. “Cost is not really an issue any more. All the products on the market are pretty cheap especially in comparison to the ROI. When you think of the cost of bandwidth, the ROI is extremely good; you can pay back a box in months.”

Others are not quite so sanguine. Neich agrees that cost is not really an issue in itself, but argues that awareness is still lacking. “The inhibitor is not always cost in terms of the boxes being too expensive; sometimes companies have just upgraded their whole network infrastructure and just don’t have the money – these things have cycles. Sometimes people just don’t know and we need to educate users that there is a better way, an alternative than just calling their service provider and upgrading their links.”

Every vendor CRN spoke to said that the ROI case is compelling, in most cases less than a year. One example from Blue Coat was a large Australian university that had a policy of not blocking anything. As a result students were downloading YouTube, videos, music and the university was spending
$1 million per year on bandwidth and averaging 10 to 15 percent per year increase. “Putting in Blue Coat reduced the traffic by 20 percent which meant it didn’t have to buy more bandwidth the next year,” said Neich.

And while WAN optimisation is almost overwhelmingly a software and hardware appliance play the opportunities it offers resellers and SIs are almost limitless according to the vendors. “What WAN optimisation allows resellers to do is to talk to a new world, the application world,” said Poulos. “It allows them to see a new segment because network and data centre managers are overwhelmed by vendors and resellers. WAN optimisation allows them to have a different discussion about the connection between network and application people.”

Riverbed’s Dixon said that there are broad opportunities for the channel. “Our product is only the starting point. It’s effectively plug and play but SIs can use it as a starting point for a 12-18 month project to consolidate, centralise, simplify and get the WAN completely optimised. There’s good dollars to be earnt doing that because there’s a lot of professional services, project management, consultancy and it delivers intrinsic strategic business value so the SI will be more important to that customer.”

When it comes to the future, most vendors CRN spoke to had new ranges due for release next year including products aimed down as far as one-person offices and Software as a Services in one case. But overwhelmingly, WAN optimisation vendors talked about the technology moving beyond the tactical play that it is in many organisations into being a strategic part of their IT infrastructure.

Despite all the blue sky, Juniper Networks manager of advanced technologies, Scott Janney, sounded a note of warning. He believes that 2008 will be the high watermark for standalone vendors as WAN optimisation technology becomes incorporated into mainstream networking hardware.