| EDITORIAL |
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Béatrice Durand
Marketing Director,
Ipanema Technologies |
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It is the Right Time for Network Infrastructure Optimization…
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Newspapers, radio and TV channels are constantly informing us about the latest developments of the worldwide financial crisis and the scary consequences both for people and businesses. It’s important that we resist this pessimism by recognizing that we can do something, each of us in our own organization; we need to adapt our thinking to face this worrying situation.
Optimization: “finding an alternative with the most cost effective or highest achievable performance under the given constraints, by maximizing desired factors and minimizing undesired ones”. (www.businessdictionnary.com)
In other words, Optimization is about doing more, better and longer with a given resource. Let’s apply this to our common topic of interest: applications over the WAN, and make use of the Ipanema Autonomic Networking System to optimize application performance, operations workload and network budget.
Daniel Poulter, Senior Product Marketing Manager at BT Global Services, describes how to optimize business application performance with the Ipanema based AAI/AOS service offering.
Frank Lyonnet comments Ipanema’s Intelligent Acceleration, and how it enables enterprises to turn the WAN into a global contributor to Enterprise productivity.
Finally, we’re happy to welcome Belgacom as a new Telco partner. No doubt you will read about them soon in this newsletter.
Do not hesitate to contact our team, visit our web site and attend our webinars and booths at tradeshows.
Kind regards,
Béatrice
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| TELCOS NEWS |
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Daniel Poulter
Senior Product Marketing Manager,
AAI, BT Global Services |
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| Optimizing Business Performance with BT AAI/AOS managed services (Applications Assured Infrastructure/Application Optimization Services) |
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Béatrice Durand for Ipanews: Dan, what is your main challenge?
Daniel Poulter: BTGS recognizes that today’s business environment is ever more challenging. Enterprises have complex supply chains as their employees, customers and suppliers are worldwide. Application response times need to be minimized. Compliance and security are board-level topics. The network is at the heart of any global business. Applications that flow across it become more important to enable business functions.
Our customers focus on being the best in their sector – not the best IT provider. We focus on being the best at IT allowing our customers to do what they do best. While IT is not be the customer’s primary business focus, it remains mission critical for their organization.
BD: What is your approach with regard to application traffic man-agement and acceleration?
Daniel Poulter: BT approaches the market as a trusted advisor that helps its customers to extract maximum value from their investments in applications and IT systems. Our professional services team works with customers to understand their business objectives and application performance indicators. We then combine Application Performance Management with professional services to assist customers in attaining their business process KPIs.
The Ipanema-based BT Applications Optimization Service (AOS) optimizes application performance even during changes in the customer’s dynamic business environment. AOS’s autonomic networking enables application based SLAs which assure the performance of customers’ applications that are delivered on their key business objectives.
BD: Why did you decided to develop an Application Performance managed service?
Daniel Poulter: Managed services that improve application performance and availability can deliver a huge ROI to customers as they reduce or prevent downtimes.
Launched 2 years ago, AOS addresses the fact that there was no managed service focusing on ensuring application performance while we saw an increasingly urgent need in the market.
BD: Why did BT pick Ipanema as the technology provider for AOS?
Daniel Poulter: The BT Group Chief Technology Office had been researching Ipanema since early 2005. When they received the requirements for AOS, they had enough experience with Ipanema to select them as a finalist to supply the technical solution. In the ensuing stringent evaluation, Ipanema emerged victorious.
Additionally, BT-Infonet brought 3 years of positive experience with Ipanema with their AC/VPN services.
Application performance management service research and development is now managed by a cross-functional team within BT. As a key partner in that space, we expect our relationship with Ipanema to continue to flourish.
BD: How successful has AAI / AOS been since its launch?
Daniel Poulter: BT now has over 40 customers using its managed optimization services, in all industry sectors.
BD: Please describe the main benefits of AAI / AOS service.
Daniel Poulter: AOS has dynamic adaptive real-time QoS mechanisms that ensure that customers’ business critical applications will perform against key performance metrics even during changes to their business environment. This allows customers to avoid costly application downtime and increases their user productivity. Compression and acceleration options can even reduce branch-office bandwidth requirements. AAI / AOS increases levels of services as most problems can be automatically avoided and the remaining ones are traced very quickly. Finally, the real-time collection of the application performance information enables the definition and en-forcement of meaningful application SLAs for key applications.
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PRODUCT NEWS
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Frank Lyonnet
Vice President Product Marketing
Ipanema Technologies
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Ipanema’s Intelligent Acceleration turns the WAN into a global and reliable contributor to the Enterprise productivity
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Béatrice Durand for Ipanews: Why do enterprises need Acceleration?
Frank Lyonnet: The WAN is highly critical to the business of modern Enterprises. To achieve their goal of increased productivity, Enterprises are implementing fundamental IT transformations that dramatically increase the pressure on the network. “Acceleration” is the market name referring to a set of well known technologies (redundancy elimination, TCP and application protocol acceleration…) that allow enterprises to mitigate the impact of constrained bandwidth and link latency. Thanks to Acceleration, users can ultimately benefit from LAN-like performance for applications hosted on servers in remote datacentres across the WAN. In a number of situations, Acceleration is key in the search for increased productivity. However, it’s only a part of the answer and needs to be associated with other application performance management technologies.
BD: Could you explain why stand-alone acceleration technologies are not sufficient?
FL: Acceleration is not a universal solution for improving user experience. While it is typically efficient on file transfer applications (that are not always business critical) on long delay and bandwidth constrained networks, it does nothing positive on real-time or interactive applications such as Voice, Video, Citrix, Windows RDP, VMware sessions etc. It is now recognized that acceleration boxes should not be deployed extensively in a network unless - a) the network topology and the application mix are very simple and stable - b) the performance bottlenecks are well understood (think for a second about the myth of network delays in domestic networks…) and - c) the business case is clear.
BD: What do you recommend for beneficial applications acceleration?
FL: I would recommend Acceleration as a part of a global WAN application management solution where it is tightly integrated with the other key pieces of a mature performance management scheme. For Ipanema, this consists of:
- Visibility to know what applications are using the network; to understand the behavior of the accelerated WAN and how it affects Quality of Experience; to see the true impact of acceleration; where the real bottlenecks are …
- Optimization to guarantee the performance of critical applications over the WAN, whether they are accelerated or not. Full layer 7 inspection and classification, allied to dynamic QoS mechanisms provide performance guarantees. Moreover, global Optimization algorithms are able to significantly increase network efficiency, reducing the need for bandwidth upgrades and maintaining budgets at the lowest possible level.
- Autonomic Networking to ensure that the configuration of the acceleration features is always up to date with the evolution of the network and IT environment, even in the largest and most dynamic organization, anywhere, anytime.
- Network Application Governance: a new world opens to network managers as the WAN truly becomes a deterministic part of IT that the whole Enterprise can count on to deliver business critical applications. This typically allows Application SLAs to be contracted between the Service Provider and the Enterprise or even between the IT department and the enterprise’s business units. Rationalizing the cost/performance tradeoff is another example of key features for Network Governance.
BD: If you had only two sentences to explain the main benefits of Ipanema Intelligent Acceleration?
FL: Ipanema’s Intelligent Acceleration combines everything required to achieve breakthrough response time improvements while delivering guarantees in terms of QoE for all business applications. Unlike point products, Intelligent Acceleration can be applied to any traffic mixes, even on large meshed networks, turning the WAN into a global, reliable contributor to Enterprise productivity.
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| NEWS |
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| Belgacom selects Ipanema for its new application-centric network services |
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Rudy Fleerakkers, Belgacom said: “We’re committed to offering the best service levels to our customers with Ipanema. We will help network managers meeting their end-users needs, ensuring critical application performance even during times of congestion.”
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| SUCCESS STORY |
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GEMALTO uses BT’s application-based managed service to reduce network costs and guarantee the performance of its ERP and videoconference applications.
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| EVENTS |
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| GARTNER Conference |
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Dec 2nd & 3rd, 2008
Sheraton Airport Hotel,
Frankfurt, GERMANY
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| MARKET SURVEY |
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