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 Considering the huge investments in creating WAN infrastructure, WAN optimization solutions provide a comprehensive bandwidth management solution for improving application response time over low-speed and congested WAN links. The WAN optimization tools can provide bandwidth optimization, reducing the amount of bandwidth required over low-speed links, latency reduction, and application acceleration of Web-based traffic to the branch office at an attractive price. Sumit Mukhija, national business development manager of Cisco System India discussed about his experience in this market with Faiz Askari.
Where do you see the status of WAN optimization as an accepted solution among Indian CIOs?
It was just six to eight months back when we started working on this market. Initially awareness was a major aspect that we need to look upon. We are now, happy to see this momentum catching up aggressively among the Indian enterprise CIOs. We have created forums to make the Indian customer first of all aware of this technology and then to co-relate to their own existing WAN infrastructure. CIOs have now very well understood the importance of this solution.
Today enterprises of all sizes are operating across multiple locations and have extensively deployed WAN. WAN optimization has become more of a business necessity than just a good-to-have solution. Increasingly, IT decision-makers want the option to integrate WAN optimization and application acceleration into a single branch-office device. Moving forward, they want devices to provide switching, routing, security, voice over IP, optimization, and WAAS.
How Cisco’s WAN Optimization product portfolio is different from other available offerings in the market?
WAN optimization is the ability to improve the performance of business applications over WANs and includes monitoring and diagnostics, traffic management, compression, and caching. Bandwidth cost reduction is not the only unique offering of our portfolio. We emphasize on providing the CIOs ease of maintenance, better quality of service, almost LAN like experience, remoter users can get better service that have always wanted to get. Apart from this, Cisco has the broadest range of technologies and products to address both generic and application-specific WAN optimization challenges.
An integrated services solution in the branch router is the logical point of consolidation for WAN optimization technologies, such as compression, caching, wide-area application services, quality of service (QoS), and access control, because it sits at the WAN/LAN interface where bottlenecks can efficiently be mitigated and critical network services (voice over IP [VoIP], security, QoS, and Multiprotocol Label Switching [MPLS]) need to be deployed. In addition ton all this, cost of maintaining networks can also be dropped on a considerable extent.
What are the common pain points of an IT head while they chose to optimize their existing WAN?
There are many issues regarding their networks that keep CIOs worried. Some of them are growing cost of maintaining cost, delivering best in class services to the remote offices, maintaining the remote office networks, maintaining compliance, bandwidth cost and many more. The CIOs who are facing such challenges can avail maximum benefits from WAN optimization.
Can you throw some light on Cisco’s presence in this space?
It would be difficult to give any number to this market size. But estimated figures can say, it can be considered as a billion Dollar market worldwide. As per Gartner report, globally, Cisco has seen a growth of 42% in its WAAS business to capture 17.8% of the market. Cisco recently announced that it had implemented its solution at more than 1,000 Customer Sites Worldwide including India. Cisco believes that WAAS along with other Applications Networking Services and bandwidth adoption will see the next level of adoption amongst enterprises in India. However, in India we are adding three to five customers for WAN optimization every month.
When should a CIO think of deploying an integrated services router WAN optimization bundle?
WAN optimization bundles should be deployed when the effective data throughput over the WAN needs to be increased by 20 to 50 percent. WAN optimization bundles should be deployed in situations where numerous low-speed serial links (T1/E1 or below) are running at or near full capacity, end users complain of very slow application response times, and obtaining additional bandwidth from the service provider is either cost-prohibitive or impossible.
Which all verticals are you looking at, as potential market segments for WAN optimization?
I should say, we are looking at enterprises that are having good number of branch offices. Segment wise, I see good potential for this range of products from insurance, banking and almost all the enterprise organizations.
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