* Equant aims to improve performance of IP apps
Equant is expanding its suite of consulting services geared toward helping corporations improve the performance of key applications running over IP networks, and the top-tier global ISP is backing up these services with its first Application service-level agreements.
Equant announced the new services and SLAs in late June. The services are available in the nearly 200 countries where Equant does business. Customers of the consulting services and SLAs can choose either Equant’s private MPLS network or its public Internet service.
In the past, Equant offered traditional SLAs based on IP network metrics such as round-trip delay, availability and jitter. Now Equant is adding end-to-end guarantees for how well individual applications run over an IP connection.
“I’m not aware of anybody else having an Application SLA,” says Dan daCosta, solutions marketing manager for Equant. “I don’t know if anyone else has as much proactive capabilities as we do to monitor applications and do something about it.”
To take advantage of the Application SLAs, customers first must purchase Equant’s consulting services. These services are known as Strategic Network and Application Predictor or SNAP.
Some SNAP services have been available for a few years. This includes the Application Performance Analysis, which involves Equant installing Packeteer devices on either end of the network to measure the response times of applications. Equant consultants and corporate network managers use data from the Packeteer devices to tweak applications or networks to optimize performance.
Customers can leave the Packeteer devices in their networks for ongoing application performance analysis. The devices can take certain actions if application performance falls below certain thresholds.
Under the SNAP umbrella, Equant also offers Application Pre-Deployment Analysis. This service, available for a few years, allows corporate network managers to figure out how a new application or a new version of an application will impact network performance.
The two new SNAP services are: Network Performance Optimization and Predictive Network Modeling. Under the Network Performance Optimization service, Equant consultants help customers with network forecasting and budgeting to handle such issues as traffic growth and seasonal peaks. The Predictive Network Modeling service allows customers to ask what-if questions about their IP networks to determine what might happen if a new application is added or if the network is migrated to a different technology.
Equant has been offering all four SNAP services to a handful of beta customers for the past nine months. One European financial services firm used the SNAP services to test how the company’s network would respond to a significant increase in Web traffic prompted by a new advertising campaign. A consumer products company used the SNAP services to determine why its SAP applications were not performing up to par.
“We got the software developers involved and optimized the design of the SAP application and matched it up with the network,” daCosta says of the consumer products company. “Now we have one of the strongest relationships with this customer. We went from almost losing this customer because they thought our network wasn’t responding to the point where they contact us before making changes to applications.”
Once the SNAP services are engaged, Equant will offer customers an application SLA. Equant says that interest in its SNAP services and Application SLAs are coming from companies with mission-critical applications such as SAP and Oracle.
“Our customers are spending a lot of money on their applications,” daCosta says. “The network is only 20% of their IT budget, but it can kill their network application or make it work depending on how it’s designed.”
Equant says the SNAP services cost anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on what the customer wants to accomplish. The ongoing Application Performance Analysis service, with the Packeteer devices, costs between $200 and $500 per month, per site.
“The return on investment for these services is that on the pure network side, there is optimization,” daCosta says. “[Customers] can increase utilization anywhere from 50% to 70%. Where customers are seeing a much stronger payback is in increased productivity because they can speed up their rollout time and increase their uptime for applications.”
