How does a thousand-fold improvement in application response time sound? Or an 87% improvement in bandwidth utilization? It may sound too good to be true, but one research firm says companies with the right policies and technologies in place are seeing gains like these.

Aberdeen Group surveyed 235 companies for its new report, “Optimizing WAN for Application Acceleration.” On the one hand, the responding companies have a lot in common. Nine out of 10 say they need more visibility into and control over the performance of their networks. In addition, 87% agree that managing their networks has become more complex over the last two years.

Another commonality is an increasingly distributed workforce. Among the respondents, 45% have 20 or more remote network locations, and 49% have 100 or more.

But when it comes to dealing with these performance concerns and management challenges, the respondents reported varying degrees of success.

To gauge that success, Aberdeen divided the respondents into three camps: Best-in-class, which includes the top 20% of respondents as measured by the research firm’s performance criteria; industry average, which represents the middle 50%; and laggard, which makes up the bottom 30%.

Of course it’s the best-in-class companies that have yielded the most gains, including 87% average improvement in bandwidth utilization, 1,158% average improvement in application response times, and 100% decreased WAN latency. The laggards, by comparison, reported 16% average improvement in bandwidth utilization, 10% average improvement in application response times, and 0% decrease in WAN latency.

The industry average fell in between the two extremes, logging 40% average improvement in bandwidth utilization, 99% average improvement in application response times, and 41% decreased WAN latency.

But just what are the best-in-class companies doing that the laggards aren’t? For starters, they are twice as likely to have policies in place for prioritizing WAN traffic (73% compared to 35%) and twice as likely to have defined traffic thresholds for optimal application performance (41% compared to 19%).

Manpower is also a distinguishing factor. Thirty-five percent of best-in-class companies have a dedicated staff for application performance management, compared to just 5% of laggards.

Not surprisingly, the WAN optimization and application acceleration technologies used by best-in-class companies far exceed those used by laggards. For example, 42% of best-in-class companies use byte caching, compared to 2% of laggards. Application-specific compression tools are used by 40% of best-in-class companies, compared to 15% of laggards. TCP acceleration tools? About 32% of best-in-class have them, compared to just 7% of laggards.

Lastly, 65% of best-in-class organizations can measure application and response times in real time, or near real time, compared to 22% of laggards.

So what do you think? Is your company best-in-class when it comes to WAN optimization? A laggard? Or somewhere in between? If there’s room for improvement in your outfit, tune in next time and I’ll share some of Aberdeen’s suggestions for improving WAN optimization efforts.

If you’d like to read the full report, a free copy is available (registration required) on Aberdeen’s site. Virtela Communications, Shunra, Mazu Networks and Exinda Networks sponsored "Optimizing WAN for Application Acceleration.”

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