Ian Clover, editor at CXO EU magazine, recently held a roundtable with Adam Davison (News - Alert), corporate vice president of sales and marketing at Expand networks. The two parties sat down to discuss the many benefits of WAN optimization.

Ian: What is driving investment in WAN optimization technology by organizations today?

Adam: WAN optimization has evolved from a tactical ‘nice to have’ to a key enabling technology for many strategic IT initiatives such as server consolidation, virtualisation, server based computing and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). In fact an effective WAN optimization solution is critical to the overall success of these projects, including the ROI or TCO.

Add to this the move to centralized, lean IT, distributed enterprise operations and a disparate workforce and you create what we describe as the ‘Proximity Gap’, whereby applications and services become further and further distanced from the user. Then there’s the growth in real-time traffic, web based applications, on demand services and a growing collaborative culture. Suddenly the WAN has become the umbilical cord between corporate applications, data and services and the business user.

Ian: How can this technology enable them to reduce their communication and bandwidth costs?

Adam: Optimizing bandwidth usage is the foundation building block of WAN optimization. By optimising the traffic flowing over the WAN you are able to send more data, resulting in more efficient use of available bandwidth, which could lead to bandwidth consolidation and reducing a company’s overall bandwidth requirements and costs.

This becomes key when faced with upgrading bandwidth to cope with increased traffic demands. Optimising the WAN and achieving greater throughput can therefore negate the need for these costly bandwidth upgrades.

Ian:  In what ways can improved WAN optimization boost productivity within organizations, particularly when it comes to better communicating with clients, business partners and customers?

Adam: The ‘Proximity Gap’ created by centralised IT and distributed operations can potentially be counterproductive. Any cost savings achieved through IT consolidation can be eroded by lost user productivity and efficiency. This is where WAN optimization becomes a critical enabler in assuring the business performance is not adversely affected.

Collaboration with partners and suppliers is key in achieving competitive advantage. The ability for customers to communicate with an organisation via multiple channels, using web based services and applications is paramount. Expand’s visibility and control capabilities combined with advanced WAN optimization techniques, allow IT to identify, monitor and accelerate the performance of business critical applications across the WAN, ensuring that the user experience is productive and efficient and that effective communications with customers, partners and other stakeholders is assured.

Ian: How does WAN optimization support the virtual office concept, which allows workers far greater flexibility in terms of where they work?

Adam: There is a saying that ‘work is what you do not where you go’. WAN optimization enables disparate employees to create ‘virtual office’ environments by delivering the corporate applications and services needed - virtually anywhere.  We call this ‘Virtual Proximity’ – putting the user in virtual proximity of business applications and services.

Supporting a ‘virtual office’ requires a mix of both physical and virtual solutions. At the central site and remote offices, a physical device may be deployed as there is adequate space and facilities to house the appliance. However, when it comes to the remote user that may be working from home, serviced office or on the road, the ability to deploy a physical device is often not possible. To overcome this a virtual WAN optimization offering is needed. Expand’s Mobile Accelerator (MACC) addresses this issue and makes the virtual office a reality as opposed to a concept.

Ian: In this competitive market what gives your product the edge?

Adam: Expand has been a pioneer and innovator in WAN optimization for over a decade and today is recognized as a market leader by many analyst organizations. We continue to innovate and have achieved a number of market firsts, especially in the area of virtualization, where Expand is unique in its ability to be both deployed as a virtual solution, as well as being able to optimize and accelerate virtualized traffic flows. And being a true virtualized offering we enable IT to leverage their existing virtual infrastructure of choice as opposed to having to use the proprietary hardware that is dictated by other vendors

Our Layer 7 QoS capabilities mean that we can gain visibility and control of over 400 business applications, ensuring prioritisation and assuring all TCP and UDP (News - Alert) traffic, including real time applications such as video and VoIP. Our virtual and physical offering means we have the most flexible deployment options of any company in the market. Furthermore, our breadth of portfolio means that we can span the entire enterprise IT infrastructure, from the data center, to the branch office, to the remote site, to the mobile worker. Add to this the ability for all devices to be centrally managed, monitored and controlled via our management platform ExpandView and we believe we have the most comprehensive, technically advanced and cost effective WAN optimization solution on the market today.