A report published by Ovum earlier this summer found that businesses are still struggling to deliver decent application performance over their network. The analyst spoke to senior IT professionals in 150 large enterprises in Europe and the US about how their WAN is coping with the ever-greater demands from applications. It found that the vast majority were starting to look to their network service provider for application optimization services.
The report was sponsored by Ipanema and the top-level findings are in its press release. Although 78% of respondents admitted that poorly performing networked applications would have a serious impact on their business, less than half of them had confidence in their tools to maintain high performance. According to author of the report and Ovum principal analyst Peter Hall, “these results suggest that the current approach has some significant limitations.”
In face of the increasing complexity of application acceleration technology and tools, between 65% and 80% of respondents were considering out-tasking application optimization to their network service provider. Areas they felt service providers could contribute most were in: guaranteeing the performance of business-critical applications and acceleration technologies to reduce bandwidth usage and delays. The full report can be downloaded after registration via Ipanema from here.
After a Masters in Computer Science, I decided that I preferred writing about IT rather than programming. My 20-year writing career has taken me to Hong Kong and London where I've edited and written for IT, business and electronics publications. In 2002 I co-founded Futurity Media with Stewart Baines where I continue to write about a range of topics such as unified communications, cloud computing and enterprise applications.