Agile Business and Process
The pressures of competition force businesses to mandate agility through process flexibility and integration. By design, web services link disparate applications on a common web platform, allowing these applications to interact with each other. This integration facilitates business process improvement. Further, applications are typically accessed through a common web browser and do not require the overhead of a separate client application. Web services simplify the way business is done, which both reduces cost and generally improves productivity.
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High Overhead and Unpredictable Performance
All of this flexibility and ease of deployment comes at a cost. Web services wrap an XML layer around all content. While this wrapping layer facilitates interaction, it often adds significant overhead. In many cases, the roll out of web services must be accompanied with a WAN bandwidth increase to cope with the additional overhead. Unfortunately, there are more challenges as applications are now subjected to the chatty nature of the web (HTTP, DNS, and even FTP). Chatty applications are particularly susceptible to high-latency WAN links, and translate into dismal user performance. Although the flexibility and innovation web services promise are attractive, the implementation costs and poor user performance can make realization of these promises difficult.
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Expand’s solution enables the full benefits of web services, accelerating the performance of the web applications to encourage user adoption and satisfaction, while simultaneously removing the cost of upgrading WAN links.
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Although web services are based on XML, XML rides on HTTP. Expand’s Application Acceleration of HTTP improves the user experience for web applications, ensuring their adoption and continued use. Without acceleration, the chatty nature of HTTP can make web applications quite frustrating, as each click signifies a long pause as new pages are fetched. Completing the web experience, Expand also offers custom accelerations for DNS and FTP. Building on these specific web services accelerations, Expand’s standards’ based TCP acceleration will provide an added measure of speed and reliability to the equation.
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Combating the need for additional bandwidth on account of the web services’ overhead, Expand’s WAN compression reliably adds 400% or more capacity to the network. Avoiding network upgrades is an immediate cost savings as well as a quick ROI for the whole solution. However, any application acceleration that is not accompanied with QoS is at great risk to fail at the first sign of congestion. With Expand’s easy to use QoS in place, applications will reliably deliver a positive user experience.
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