TRAC's survey research shows that the top goals for end-user organizations when deploying solutions for WAN optimization are to improve the speed of applications over the WAN and increase network throughput. However, the survey also shows that the top challenges for managing the delivery of applications to end-users are caused by lack of visibility and control over the network traffic. In order to deal with challenges of ensuring seamless delivery of business critical applications over the WAN, organizations need to ensure that they are deploying management solutions that include strong capabilities across three key areas: acceleration, visibility, and control.

This report from TRAC Research examines capabilities that organizations are putting in place to ensure that applications are delivered over the WAN at optimal levels of end-user experience.

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New applications, IT initiatives and end-user requests for improving the effectiveness of managing enterprise infrastructure are changing the role that WAN optimization solutions play in the enterprise. Benefits that end-user organizations are looking to achieve from deploying various WAN optimization and accelerating technologies go beyond just mitigating bandwidth upgrades and improving network throughput. WAN optimization solutions are becoming one of the key enablers of top IT initiatives. IT projects such as data center consolidation and desktop and server virtualization improve the flexibility of managing computing resources; but, at the same time, they are moving computing resources further away from the end user, which increases the amount and complexity of data that is being transferred over the WAN.

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When talking to end-users I often get questions like: who are the WAN Optimization vendors that should be on our “short list”? And it is nearly impossible to answer this question without asking them 10 or so questions, such as: how many network locations does your company have, how many users per location, what applications are your company running, what IT projects are you looking to support, what are your security and compliance requirements, etc.

If we are talking about an end-user company that has thousands of locations, an average of 30+ users per location and is looking to conduct a data center consolidation, companies like Ipanema Technologies and Silver Peak are very likely to be on their list. If we are talking about a company that has less than 500 employees, has a relatively small IT department and is running bandwidth-intensive, time-sensitive applications and technologies such as video conferencing or VoIP, then vendors like Exinda should be higher on their list then some of the others. This is not to say that the vendors mentioned above are the best solutions for the usage scenarios that I described, it is only to say that these solutions are more effective (from both business and technology perspectives) in certain use cases.