Market Trends

Economic pressure for new ways of doing business and the availability of new technologies are accelerating the customer demand for managed/outsourced services and the consolidation of services, which ease management and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO). Additionally, service providers are looking at ways to minimize upfront investment s and improve cash flow, which is driving a move away from CAPEX to OPEX and pay-as-you-go models.

Market Needs

As businesses increasingly embrace mobility, working-from-home, hosted applications, server consolidation and virtualization, the physical distance between the remote or mobile user and the server hosting applications greatly increases. This creates significant challenges for application performance and user experience as they become increasingly hampered by the bandwidth and latency challenges of the WAN, remote access connections and the mix of traffic types. Because of these factors, the performance of applications delivered to remote user locations can dramatically decrease and the user experience can be severely diminished. This is especially so, when bandwidth or traffic flow is limited, for example 3G or satellite connections. In addition, the bursty bandwidth demands of certain tasks, such as printing, can have significant performance implications.

To overcome these issues, businesses need accelerated delivery and guaranteed performance of business critical applications and IT services across distributed enterprise landscapes, whether hosted, virtualized or delivered through cloud environments. As such, WAN optimization with application visibility and control needs to be provided across the WAN from the data center through to branch offices and mobile users. Expand’s Accelerator solution provides unprecedented application performance improvements and bandwidth reductions using its transparent Real-Time all-IP engine, providing many benefits including:

• Visibility, Control & Layer 7 QoS
• Dynamic L7 prioritization of business critical applications
• Monitor & control all HTTP, ICA & RDP applications
• L7 Application monitoring
• Virtual Bandwidth and Latency Reduction
• Enable up to 1000% more traffic over existing infrastructure
• Provide enhanced user experience
• Optimization and Acceleration
• Offloading compression and encryption from the Server
• More sessions, improved user performance
• Virtual Branch Server
• WAFS/CIFS for server consolidation, local printing, DHCP & DNS
• LAN-like Performance for file access

Expand Accelerators can be deployed as Virtual Appliances in data centers, branch offices and on PCs and laptops for small remote offices and mobile users. They easily integrate into a virtual infrastructure or cloud based services from user to data center . The ExpandView Virtual management platform allows service providers to manage the WAN optimization needs of many different customer deployments without having to deploy dedicated systems. ExpandView Virtual is deployed as a virtual application within a virtualized IT infrastructure to deliver efficient and effective services to customers. It overcomes the traditional challenges previously associated with installation, configuration and management presented by heterogeneous hardware environments and operating system configurations, allowing for rapid provisioning, large scale WAN optimization deployments and ease of management.

Enabling new service revenues

By providing WAN optimization, application visibility and control, service providers can deliver enhanced services with significant application performance improvements, bandwidth reductions, with unprecedented levels of deployment flexibility, scalability and management capabilities. Telco, MSP and cloud services need to be:

• More responsive to customer needs - On demand
• More efficient
• Delivered without user experience degradation

The Expand Networks WAN Optimization ‘On Your Terms’ solution enables the delivery of enhanced services for Telco managed WAN, MSP hosted applications and Cloud based applications, The Expand solution enables service providers to increase ARPU and generate more revenue, by realizing:

• Competitive Advantage – In a market where infrastructure is seen as a commodity, value added services are critical in gaining market share. Enhanced and differentiated services will enable service providers to retain existing customers and win new customers
• Financial Advantage – By eliminating upfront capital investment costs and moving to a subscription based ‘pay as you sell’ model, service providers are able to free up cash flow and concentrate investment in areas that will deliver business revenues, such as customer acquisition service enablement.
• Profitability – WAN optimization will enable service providers to deliver enhanced and differentiated services that command a premium price tag, thereby increasing profitability. Furthermore, the ability to be able to monitor customer usage and visibility into application performance, service providers can identify customer needs and propose other services to meet these needs resulting in incremental revenue streams.