What Do You Think of Expand’s Compass Accelerator?

We are an Expand reseller based in the UK. We have installed Expands WAN Optimisation products (Compass) in numerous companies with multi sites throughout the world.

In our experience the Expand products have a proven track record with regard to application optimisation. Having looked at a number of product offerings from various vendors we chose Expand because they are prepared to directly back up their claims regarding optimisation and application acceleration. Under their proof of concept scheme Expand will actually install their products into a customer’s site for a 30 day evaluation period. How many vendors undertake this level of commitment?

As a reseller we work with many of the leading vendors and Expand are one of the vendors that meets our criteria for offering an excellent product backed with world wide support. A high endorsement I know but it’s refreshing to work with a vendor with a product that delivers!!

I am a customer. A long standing and very satisfied customer. I leverage expand technology to improve the quality of our thin client / centralised / consolidated computing experience. We have 30+ expand units servicing 3 datacentres and 29 remote office and providing essential computing & voice to our 650+ users throughout the world. WAFS has been implemented recently with great success and provides near-instant access to our central filesystem. I have worked very closely with Expand at all levels for the last 6 years and am proud to say they are one of my very trusted technology vendors and advisors. If you choose the expand team, you won't be disappointed, they're smart and helpful, they will make their technology work for you and wont fill you full of false hope or lies. Straight-talking in a world gone made. They're perfect for me. I hope you find them to be the same.

We are a highly technical networking consultancy who propose and provide vendor agnostic solutions in the technology areas of VoIP, Security and network upgrades. Very often, these solutions are putting additional workload on networks and most organisations have options of either incurring additional costs from their WAN carrier or using Network Optimisation Technology.

A couple of years ago, we needed a product of this type in our portfolio and thus reviewed the market. Having considered the "Best of Breed" solutions, we selected Expand as our vendor of choice. This was based on a number of things including their technical capability to execute, the ease in which they deploy proof of concepts/evaluations and their 24x7x365 support. Since our partnership, we have deployed hundreds of these devices worldwide and see no reason why this will not continue in the future.

I will conclude by saying that Expand are one of the best, if not the best vendors we work with and if you are considering the deployment of Network Optimisation technology, Expand will not disappoint.

As a technology integrator, our firm first came across Expand after surveying the marketplace for best of breed solutions ideal for WAN optimization. With our wireless, satellite and terrestrial networking strengths, our company is driven by utilizing the best tools for the client's needs, and Expand's Accelerators fulfill these fundamental engineering and technical requirements that we have -- they are the "right tools".

The Expand Accelerator platform and its Compass feature set are easily among the most robust and well-designed solutions for WAN optimization, and have proven themselves to us and our clients as best of breed technology. We have deployed solutions from all of the serious contenders in the high-peformer space of the WAN optimization market, and Expand has to be considered the standard for quality of performance and its customer and partner support. Many of our clients are in the sweet spot for WAN optimization solutions, using constrained or highly asymmetric WAN links in regions of the world with expensive and limited bandwidth options.

Although there is a temptation or risk for many WAN optimization devices to be oversold or marketed as "flip-the-switch" or "plug and play" solutions, Expand combines a stong product with sound engineering and support. Expand's platform maintenance and expert support are great complements to the devices.

Any time you suggest a WAN optimization solution without understanding the user's unique network needs, you set unrealistic expectations for peformance improvement and you lull the user into treating this sophisticated technology as a 'magic' box. In our experience, even the most conservative performance improvements are valuable and justify the investment in a best of breed solution like Expand. The added benefit comes when the user finds even more throughput and utilization improvements than expected. The Accelerator platform works right out of the box, but is sophisticated enough to enable a skilled user to incrementally leverage more visibility into its traffic and better management of that traffic.

The implementer and the user both need to understand which of the many features to use for their specific needs, how to use the available features most effectively, and most importantly, how to use them in a way that integrates seamlessly with other devices and services running on the network. Anyone who has deployed WAN optimization devices on networks that have access limitations, traffic shaping or other controls in the mixed on or behind the WAN, knows that all of these technologies have to be well-coordinated and integrated.

In our experience Expand's engineers have shown the ability to help find, identify and diagnose network performance problems and issues that the user is often too busy to fix or simply unaware of. This level of expertise is a valuable intangible asset that makes Expand a benchmark among leading WAN optimization providers.

As a provider, we know that these solutions work -- physics don't lie. The challenge lies in getting the end users to understand how to make these work most effectively and document the performance benefits and financial savings for each user's situation so the user can make an informed decision. Generally, an informed decision from a financial perspective and/or operational perspective is to deploy. Expand is a great partner for us as an integrator, and they help us to earn end users confidence and business with a great platform and expertise to back it up.

We are a network integrator and recently conducted a head to head bakeoff of several vendors. We had Silver Peak, Cisco, Expand, Riverbed, Stampede and iDirect send us equipment and engineers to configure their devices. Each vendor had one day to configure the equipment and then we conducted a series of tests to measure the performance. We tested file copies, FTP downloads, Web (clear text and SSL) and used the WAFS benchmark tool. We did a cold, warm and modified copy of all the files to test the compression and caching ability of the devices. All tests were conducted by automated scripts and the results were compiled to produce a composite score of each vendor. Expand was the clear winner in all categories, and no other vendor was even close to their performance. The results were so good that we retested all the equipment again after all the vendor engineers left and the results were the same. To further validate the outcome a pilot network was set up to test the Expand equipment in the real world, and the pilot network worked just as well as the testing predicted.

Bottom line is that Expand makes a great product that does an exceptional job of accelerating WAN performance.

We are an Expand reseller in Brazil, and have been working with their accelerators for over 3 years, with hundreds of units deployed.

Compass is a very robust, scalable and complete platform. All of its technology reflects deep experience acquired over time. It is very flexible, allowing implementations on any topology you can think of. It is based on open standards, allowing easy integration and bringing peace of mind for the long run. It supports almost any type of IP traffic so you do not have to worry about adopting new applications or technologies.

All of our customers are very satisfied, not only with the accelerators, but also with the support which is very responsive and knowledgeable. We feel very confident about Expand's solutions and believe they are second to none.

I have been an Expand Networks customer for a little over 1 year now and have to say that I am completely happy with their product. From the performance to the support all around it has been a great experience. Our Network a very complicated Satellite environment with high packet loss, large congestion and a broad range of applications has truly become a usable WAN environment because of the Expand product. We evaluated several other products from the likes of Riverbed,Cisco and Juniper. During our testing we made a decision to go with Expand based on several factors
1. Performance- they performed the best on our apps in our network period
2. Support- Expand was readily available to provide support when ever it was needed
3. Price- While not he lowest Expand showed the best value for performance in our network
4. Usability- I have found the solution to be very user friendly and works as advertised.

Two thumbs up to Expand!!

My perspective in working with Expand Networks is somewhat unique. For nearly five years I thoroughly evaluated Expand's product suite from customer, sales engineer and developer perspectives (since AcceleratorOS v4.1). Presently, I run a startup, and we are again turning to Expand for their field-proven optimization technologies.

I have worked along side Expand employees from within almost all aspects of the company, from the Israeli engineering team to the worldwide sales and support organization. Expand employs a huge diversity of talented people, however, they all seem to share a common desire to produce a high-quality, customer focused product.

As I evaluate potential partnerships throughout the technology industry, I have found myself comparing prospective partners against Expand as the 'standard'.

For the purposes of this article, I aim my question squarely at you IT types:

When you implement a new technology in your network, do you want to buy it from the established leader (and creator) of the industry, or from a 'me-too' company with a much less mature code-base?

We are a network systems integrator that has been providing the Expand Networks solution for over six years.

We have watched as the market segment for WAN Optimization has continued grow and companies have faded in and out. The most steady and feature rich company has been Expand as they have been able to react to customer demands and make changes or additions to their Accelerator platform to meet those needs.

Our customers expect that we will provide a solution that will enable them to complete their job when lives are on the line. When we provide and Expand solution, they know that is exactly what they are getting.