As 2009 winds down, most enterprises who follow the standard calendar fiscal year, are typically in budget planning mode if not already finished for 2010 spend.
Indeed, we have seen some hestitation or delay in some investments this year. A more popular request of late is that enterprises are requesting more OPEX based services rather than adding CAPEX to their end of year bottom lines. WAN optimization remains a technology area still in demand given the changes of focus on consolidation and virtualization, which are common areas for quicker cost reduction around IT but where maintaining performance remains a challenge.
Managed WAN optimization provides many financal benefits while offloading the need for up-front capital. Taking advantage of all the capabilities that WAN optimization provides - traffic shaping/QoS, compression, acceleration, and caching - enables better return on application usage and end-user productivity.
We are seeing upwards of 50% increase of application performance response times for some enterprises who have experienced degradation especially following a server or data center consolidation.
Additionally, managed WAN optimization has enabled double-digit TCO savings on the network and IT for enterprises out-tasking the management of such infrastructure. Being able to take advantage of such numbers that WAN optimization can enable, makes it more interesting for enterprises to move sooner rather than waiting out the economic situation.
Jean is Head of Solution Consulting, Europe at Orange Business. She leads a team of professional services consultants based throughout Europe who consult and deliver unified comms-collaboration, APM, security and SDN/SD-WAN solutions for global multinational customers. Over the last two years, her team has been driving the SDN/SD-WAN journey transformation of Orange customers.