The message is sinking in: Adding bandwidth isn't a cure-all for application performance problems. 

A year ago, 47% of companies surveyed by Aberdeen Group said they experienced no improvements in application performance after upgrading their WAN bandwidth. Fast forward to today, and Aberdeen found in a new report (available for free download until Nov. 14) that more companies are looking to WAN optimization and application delivery solutions - instead of simply adding bandwidth  to alleviate their application performance woes.

One driver is the growth in branch offices. Aberdeen has found that, on average, 52% of employees work outside of corporate headquarters. In addition, end-user organizations expect that number to increase 7% by the end of 2008.

As employees have become more far-flung, IT operations have consolidated: Roughly 62% of servers and 65% of enterprise applications have been centralized, according to the research firm. The more data is centralized and staff is dispersed, the greater the need for delivering applications over the WAN.

It’s no wonder spending on WAN optimization and application delivery products is expected to rise 7.8% over the next 12 months, according to 170 organizations Aberdeen surveyed in July and August. The three biggest reasons companies are adopting these products are the centralization of business-critical data and applications (cited by 59% of survey respondents); the need to optimize employee productivity (37%); and the need to decrease the cost of data communications (30%).(Compare
application acceleration and WAN traffic optimization products.)

As part of its research, Aberdeen identified best practices associated with application delivery over the WAN, along with common challenges.

For starters, the “best in class” companies -- those that have optimized application delivery over the WAN most successfully -- share common capabilities and toolsets, according to Aberdeen. For example, they’re able to identify application delivery bottlenecks, measure the impact of WAN optimization on business process, and accurately predict response times of new applications before they’re deployed over the WAN. Some of the technologies that best-in-class companies depend on include tools for prioritizing business-critical applications, protocol-specific optimization capabilities, and a lab environment for testing application performance over emulated WAN conditions.

The top challenges of delivering applications over the WAN include the chattiness of currently deployed applications (cited by 46% of respondents); an increased amount of rich content (43%); lack of coordination between different groups within IT (31%); lack of tools to test application changes (30%); SSL encryption (26%); and lack of capacity planning (26%).

In the next newsletter I’ll go over some additional highlights of Aberdeen’s new report and insight from its author, analyst Bojan Simic. Titled “Optimizing Application Delivery over the WAN,” the report is available for free download (registration required) until the promotional period ends on Nov. 14.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.