Enterprise CIOs and analysts discussed how to align enterprise wide area network performance with business goals over breakfast at BT Tower this week. The overwhelming message was that networks need to be managed a lot better than they are now, but are enterprises prepared to stump up the costs?
Enterprises across the globe froze their telecoms budgets in 2009 because of the economic crisis. But they now face growing network issues as a result.
The problem is that although enterprises may not have spent much money on upgrading their wide area networks, they have continued to add data-heavy services and applications. Many company networks are therefore in need of an upgrade of some description as their networks begin to struggle with the heavier demands on bandwidth.
According to Phil Sayer, principal analyst at Forrester Research, most large multinational companies have been forced to undertake some sort of WAN optimization measures to improve the performance of their networks. He added that the best approach is to tackle how actual applications can be speeded up, such as by eliminating the number of TCP "handshakes" an application has to make on its journey along the network.
But some enterprise CIOs still have their work cut out when it comes to making the case for potentially costly network improvements and for installing tools such as those from Ipanema that provide greater network visibility.
"We've noticed that pure bandwidth prices have come down," said Simon Jones, service coordinator WAN at Clariant, a speciality chemicals manufacturer. "But we are ramping up costs on the technology side. We're having to pay more."
As Jones said, some enterprises still prefer to throw more bandwidth at their problems because it is the cheaper short-term solution. "If it then does not work, you have the argument that you need to invest in network improvement measures," he commented.
Jones said Clariant first installed Ipanema tools around six years ago and this has allowed the company to see which applications are being used on the network and to better prioritize traffic.
Persuading management to allocate more budget to IT services is not helped by the fact that "network management" is far from cool: "Cloud computing is sexy, but network management is not," said Sayer.
In an ideal world, he added, people would be spending more money on tools and services to improve how things will work.
"The cloud is getting the headlines now," agreed Ivor Kendall, director of network services at BT Global Services. "But it's all about application performance; how apps work over the network."
Sayer warned, however, that WAN optimization tools are not "fit and forget" applications. "They need to be managed," he said. He pointed out that some carriers such as BT Global Services are also now offering CPE management as part of their overall managed network service portfolios. "But the future of WAN optimization is getting it off the customer premises and into the network," he added.
The WAN optimization market certainly appears to be a buoyant one: Sayer pointed out that up to a dozen companies are still competing for market share, with Riverbed, Blue Coat Systems and Expand the current market leaders. Other players include Cisco, Silver Peak, Juniper, F5, and Citrix. Ipanema Technologies is slightly different in that it does not sell directly to enterprises but uses channels such as systems integrators, VARs, and operators such as BTGS and Orange Business Services.
Infonetics Research estimated that the global WAN optimization market exceeded the US$1-billion mark in 2008, but declined slightly in 2009 because of the recession. Growth is expected again once economic conditions have improved this year.
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