After launching its U.S. operations in 2006, Ipanema Technologies is set to spread its flavor of network optimization technologies in the North American market. Last week, I had a chance to catch up with Houda Chabir, who in late February took on the role of vice president of North American operations at Ipanema. We talked about the French vendor’s technologies and its strategy for making them available to enterprises -- primarily via telecom service providers’ managed offerings, such as those already available from Ipanema customers BT and Orange Business Services.

Here’s what Chabir had to say about managing application traffic across the wide area, performing application-level traffic inspection, and helping telcos provide the next generation of service-level agreements (SLA).

* Distinguishing Ipanema’s platform: “Our hardware devices communicate together. Every device at every site is communicating with all the other devices to discuss what they are getting in and what they are getting out, and they are sharing all this information with central software. This is how we can create detailed reports to help our customers do the measurements, do the aggregations, and deliver the SLA.”

* Telco trend to offer application-level SLAs: “Up to now [telecom service providers] were delivering SLAs, but they were at the network level. What they like about our solution is that we are providing measurements at the application level, at the session level. We are going to Layer 7 and doing deep inspection of the flow and the sessions to make sure we can guarantee an SLA at the application level …. If they can provide application SLAs, there is a lot of potential business there… Enterprises are waiting for it, it’s just a matter now of implementation.”

* Warning telcos if SLA limits are in danger of being crossed: “If a telco is committing to an application for certain number of users, what if the customer has more users? We have over-activity indicators that will help the providers. If there’s any over-activity, they can send alarms to their customers or to their salespeople to tell them they may not be able to achieve an SLA because there is higher usage than the commitment made….they will see it and be able to warn their customers.”

For more information about Ipanema’s platform, check out what The Tolly Group had to say about the effectiveness of its technology.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.