In a previous newsletter, we discussed how businesses that used to view branch offices as unnecessary now view them as providing an essential customer touch point. As a result, businesses are aggressively deploying a variety of critical applications at branch offices, including CRM and enterprise resource management applications, plus VoIP and real-time video services.

However, research that we recently conducted indicates that there is a wide divergence in terms of the WAN optimization technologies that IT organizations are deploying in order to support their burgeoning branch office networks.

On a positive note, our research indicates that the majority of the 192 respondents to the survey have already made a significant deployment of technologies such as MPLS and queuing that allow organizations to ensure some level of QoS. The same research also indicates that the deployment of these technologies will increase significantly over the next year.

However, there has been notably less deployment of other WAN optimization technologies such as TCP acceleration, wide area file services, and caching. A good example of this spotty deployment is the use of compression technologies.  According to our research, only a minority of companies is currently making any use of compression technologies, and the vast majority of the companies that are using these technologies are making at most a moderate use of them.

We would like to hear from you. Which WAN optimization technologies has your company already deployed? Have those technologies provided the benefits that you thought they would? What issues have you faced in trying to justify deploying WAN optimization technologies?

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.