* Customer loyalty could help Cisco in the crowded WAN optimization market
Cisco last week announced a product suite that plants the networking giant firmly in the WAN optimization market, and while industry watchers say the company is late to the market, at least one existing customer finds the product worth a look.
Cisco last week introduced its Wide-Area Application Service (WAAS) suite, which includes technologies for wide-area file services, compression, caching, TCP acceleration and other optimization methods. The company joins vendors such as Expand Networks, F5 Networks, Riverbed, Packeteer and a slew of others promising to optimize application performance over the WAN. The company’s products enter a market that already features products that have gained mainstream adoption in the past year, but that doesn’t mean you can count Cisco out just yet.
“This will ensure that Riverbed won’t win every single account and that there is a credible Cisco-based alternative,” says Robert Whiteley, a senior analyst with Forrester Research.
Harold Hamm, vice president of information technology and telecommunications for Reynolds, Smith and Hills, an architecture and engineering firm in Jacksonville, Fla., is an example of that. Hamm says Cisco’s product plans could solve a significant performance issue for his company. With some 17 design offices and 25 project facilities connected via T-1s, Hamm says file sharing among the offices was a challenge. And when he investigated WAN optimization technology, he found a lot of good offerings, but not too many perfect fits for his organization.
“Because we have large files and we have expertise in many offices, I need this type of technology,” Hamm says. “When I went looking for it, I found plenty of great products, but none that I felt comfortable rolling out considering my environment.”
For one, Hamm says, he spent time building the QoS policies within his existing network infrastructure to give Cisco IP phones the bandwidth they require. For that reason, he says, he wasn’t entirely comfortable putting devices from another vendor on his network to impact WAN traffic. Secondly, at the time he went shopping for technology, he had Novell file and print servers, which the leading vendor, Riverbed in his opinion, didn’t support. Now that he’s migrating to Windows file and print servers, Hamm says, it may not have been an issue.
But one point that the competition may not be able to stack up against Cisco is customer loyalty. Industry research firm have Cisco dominating somewhere between 70% to 80% of enterprise IT shops, which means if the company provides tools to solve an acute pain point and enhance existing investments, the competition could suffer.
“I trust Cisco. There is a comfort that comes with knowing that this is the company’s bread and butter,” Hamm says.
