It might surprise readers to learn the companies most successful at WAN application delivery don't necessarily spend a whole lot more money than those that struggle to optimize application delivery.

As I mentioned in the last newsletter, Aberdeen Group surveyed 170 organizations over the summer to glean best practices for optimizing application delivery over the WAN.

The companies deemed “best in class” spend money differently than those deemed “industry average” or “laggards,” according to Bojan Simic, a research analyst at Aberdeen and author of the new research.

For example, while best-in-class companies spend an average of $234 per user per year on WAN optimization and application delivery solutions, they only spend $126 per user per year on data communications services. Conversely, the other companies in Aberdeen’s survey spend more on data communications ($162 per user per year) than best-in-class companies do, and less on WAN optimization and application delivery solutions ($203 per user per year).

“These organizations are spending essentially the same money, but they’re making different decisions about where their money goes,” Simic says. “For the same money, best-in-class organizations are getting performance improvements that are 10x or 15x higher than that of all others.”

The lesson learned is to spend wisely: Best-in-class organizations do a good job analyzing the cost-benefit of bandwidth upgrades vs. other hardware and software investments, for example. “It’s about where your money goes, not how much money you’re spending,” Simic says.

Here are some of the other findings of the report:

* Poor communications hurts. A lack of communication between different IT groups impedes application delivery over the WAN, Simic says. Aberdeen found best-in-class organizations are three-times more likely to have formal communication channels between application development, systems and network management teams as compared to laggards. Sharing information about servers, networks and applications helps companies resolve performance issues more quickly, Simic says.

* Virtualization is becoming a bigger issue. When companies were asked a year ago which infrastructure projects were impacting application performance over the WAN, 48% cited server virtualization. This time around, 77% of respondents said server virtualization is having an impact on application performance over the WAN. The numbers suggest some WAN optimization and application delivery solutions “are not effectively addressing the virtualization issue, and organizations are looking to deploy solutions that would include features and functionalities that would be specific to optimizing application performance while conducting virtualization projects,” Aberdeen concludes.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.