What are the 3 hottest trends in the WAN optimization space?

Demand for predictive recommendations:

As networks continue to get more complex and IT staff more constrained, buyers will demand solutions that provide proactive recommendations and automated troubleshooting to avoid or address problems before they become catastrophes. Customers are already beginning to request features for tracking usage patterns and trends within their own network and in the networks of similar companies as a means for recommending optimal solutions faster. This is particularly valuable in the mid-market where IT resources are constrained.

Demand for granular control of all five network dimensions:

Identification, classification and management of users, applications, activities, devices, and locations will increase in importance as a determining WAN Optimization Controllers (WOC) buying criteria. Driven by device expansion, higher variance in user profiles and changes in application types and delivery, network control over the five dimensions within a single policy and management framework will become an even more prominent buying requirement.

Demand for solution personalization:

Generic networking solutions like basic acceleration, quality of service, and reporting will cease to be good enough for many WOC buyers. Demand for personalized solutions and contextual insights and actions will drive the next phase of WOC innovation. As the network and applications become more tightly coupled, business centric IT solutions that go beyond generic or isolated network insights will be in demand.

Do you see the market growing or shrinking over the next few years?

We see the WOC market growing moderately. We also see the market converging with several adjacent sectors including application performance management and network performance monitoring and diagnostics.
 

What are the ramifications of recreational traffic in the workforce?

Consumerization, BYOD/BYOA and the social enterprise have created a situation where the lines between strategic and recreational traffic are blurring. Recreational traffic, when left unmanaged, can cannibalize valuable bandwidth and corrupt the user experience of a company’s strategic business applications. Everyone has been on a web conference at one time or another where voice quality suffers because someone in the office is downloading a big file or streaming a video.

What makes this issue even more complex is when you consider how frequently so-called recreational applications like YouTube or Facebook are also used for strategic business purposes. So the complexity facing IT teams today is how to tell the difference between a recreational app being used for recreation and a recreational app being used for business objectives. The ability to understand the context by which applications are being used and having the power to control that use, are critical to the success of companies today.

What is the importance of application prioritization to the enterprise?

Prioritizing traffic is an essential component to orchestrating the WAN. Some applications, like email, can be accelerated using conventional approaches but an increasing number of apps like VoIP, Video and others can’t be accelerated in the conventional sense. In order to guarantee these kinds of mission critical applications the network resources they require, prioritization is key.

Moreover, prioritization makes it easy to ensure business critical apps get bandwidth allocation preference over recreational or less critical apps.