Two views

Uthappa opines that having a standard desktop policy across enterprise branches is what organizations should opt for. With this policy in place, organizations should be able to use business critical applications without any latency or user-access difficulties.

This is exactly what Noida-based Honda Siel Cars did. The company has 55 dealers located across 65 locations in the country, and needed to connect with these dealers through a centralized web environment. If the applications were designed poorly they would become bandwidth hungry and ultimately affect users. To ensure an optimized WAN environment, Honda installed its dealer management software based on a client-server architecture.

“Managing this software from a remote location was a daunting task, so we thought of hosting the software in a centralized and controlled way. We have collated all the data and will now make it online,” says Hilal Isar Khan, Head of IT at the company. Honda is targeting 100 dealer outlets across India by 2009 as per its expansion strategy based on the ‘1 dealer per 1,000 cars’ formula.

Khan believes that it is late for Honda to find partners in the market for WAN optimization solutions, and it could be an expensive proposition under the current circumstances. He however states that the WAN optimization solution from Citrix is helpful for Web-based applications.

Making a choice

Studies carried out by some companies indicate that the equipment needed for WAN optimization typically costs a considerable amount of money(entry level products start at $ 1000 and goes up to $30,000 for high- end

products), is highly dependent on speed, and in relation to other solutions will make sense only in a very
narrow space.

“High pricing would be an issue for Indian enterprises as the market here has not been commoditized. We have therefore decided to offer WAN optimization as a desktop and laptop client to increase adoption,” informs Johnathon Cervelli, Product Marketing Manager, Blue Coat. On the other hand, vendors like Cisco have solutions that use WAN optimization solutions at the data center and branch office levels.

The other choice for enterprises is the WAN optimization technology embedded in Microsoft Windows Vista and Longhorn Server. According to Utah-based Burton Group report Longhorn will assign priority and bandwidth limits to applications on a network, but only if there’s a Vista client on the other end.

So enterprises who are planning to migrate to the new OS can think of it as an alternative to exclusive WAN optimized solutions. As per reports the solution has improved TCP flow control, quality of service and error recovery in addition to faster access to remote files because of improvements to the CIFS protocol.

Industry studies suggest that with many options available in the market, IT managers should evaluate alternative solutions before fixing their eye on any one. A technical benchmark and RoI is insufficient for evaluating products because WAN optimization solutions vary greatly in cost and impact different applications in different ways.

“Enterprises should wait for six months to a year before expecting RoI on WAN optimized solutions since enterprise usage differs from one customer to another,” advises Devendra Kamtekar, Manager, Systems Engineering, NetDevices Networks.

Another question that arises is the scalability of such solutions. What happens when new applications are deployed? How easy and cost effective is it to add new offices? Would the existing WAN optimization device meet the demands?

“One appliance will not be sufficient to bear the load of new applications and expanding networks. Enterprises would need to spend on hardware equipments for up gradation of WAN optimization products,” says Nortel’s Paul.

The future WAN optimization solutions would include technologies that incorporate dynamic business policies, pattern-matching capabilities and protocol analysis with correlation and automated actions. “In another two years, routers and switches will evolve and have in-built WAN optimization features,” predicts Cisco’s Kharade.

The current challenge for organizations lies in picking solutions that best align with their business needs and also fall within their budgets.