For the last six weeks we've been interviewing US carriers to determine whether application performance management services have come of age in the US as they have in Europe. By application performance management we mean services that provide visibility into application performance, as well as services that control and/or accelerate application performance. Our verdict is that the US is experiencing a groundswell of new application performance management services, and we predict that groundswell will grow into a wave in the next year or so.
Last March we profiled offerings from AT&T and Verizon Business. Today we add XO Communications, Global Crossing, Virtela, TMC Communications, and Sprint to the list of US application performance management service providers--bumping to eight the number of US service providers we know of who have jumped into the pool.
Here are some overall trends we see based on our interviews:
As luck would have it, just yesterday XO Communications unveiled a new lineup of three Fluke-based application and network performance monitoring and reporting solutions. In a nutshell, XO's new offerings come in three service packages that build upon one another. The first, called simply Network Performance, provides a snapshot of network goings-on (e.g., latency, packet loss, jitter), and measures delivery against MPLS Class of Service settings. Network and Applications Performance, the second service up the stack, monitors what applications are running on your network, how well they are performing over time, and generates alarms when new applications appear or usage thresholds are exceeded. The all-inclusive third service package, Network, Applications and VoIP Performance, adds voice call analytics including MOS scores for every call.
We detect growing commonality because XO's services almost exactly mirror those Global Crossing rolled out a while ago. Global Crossing was, however, more imaginative with its nomenclature--calling its services Network Integrity, Applications Integrity, and VoIP Integrity. AT&T and Verizon Business also have Fluke-based application performance monitoring and reporting services, which we described back in March.
Fluke, whom we profiled in our blog two weeks ago, is clearly the current top pick for US service providers to deliver application performance monitoring and reporting services.
Global Crossing tells us they plan to roll out a Juniper WXC-based application acceleration service in 2009. Global Crossing has chosen Juniper for its out-the-chute offering because they use Juniper core routers and have a good working relationship in place with Juniper. But they made it clear to us that they plan to be vendor agnostic, so we can expect them to expand their offering to include other vendors-perhaps Cisco, since they also have a great deal of Cisco gear in their network.
Virtela, whose market sweet spot is to serve Global 2000 enterprises and who calls itself a virtual network operator (VNO), offers a customized application acceleration service called Managed WAN Acceleration. Customers often outsource "rest of world" network services to Virtela while managing the same functions themselves within their home country. They also provide what they call "spot" solutions to large companies such as Motorola or Honeywell. This means that Virtela can provide its Managed Acceleration service as a standalone service, distinct from its other service offerings.
Virtela's Managed WAN Acceleration service is highly flexible, and can take just about any form a customer wants. The service includes help selecting the appropriate hardware solution, installation, configuration, and ongoing management. Virtela began offering the service based on Juniper WXC and Riverbed Steelhead products, and subsequently added Ipanema to the mix. Virtela is also looking at adding Expand. Thus far, Virtela has found that smaller customers prefer Riverbed, although Virtela itself prefers to offer these customers the Juniper solution for ease of management. Virtela says its larger customers prefer the Ipanema solution because of its quality of service capabilities and its reporting. Virtela tells us they aim to standardize their offerings more in the future.
In October Sprint announced its Secure WAN Acceleration service that combines acceleration for important applications with the elimination of malicious or unwanted traffic. It is Sprint's first application performance management service offering. Sprint tells us that the primary purpose of the service is to support voice/data convergence by helping ensure that VoIP performs well when voice and data are blended into a highly distributed network interconnecting remote offices.
Based on Blue Coat's ProxySG appliances and ProxyClient software, Sprint Secure WAN Acceleration applies priority handling, caching and compression to control and accelerate select applications, and it blocks viruses and malware. One underlying theme for Sprint is that caching, compression and blocking of malicious content lowers the load on the network, thus freeing up bandwidth for voice. One fly we see in this ointment is that there is no bandwidth allocation to ensure the data doesn't encroach on the bandwidth VoIP needs, and another fly seems to be a weak visibility story.
Stay tuned for more on what the service providers are up to in the application performance management space . . .
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