Talking WAN optimisation

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.

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