Posted by: Eric Siegel
Is there anyone who hasn't felt the threat of layoffs this last few months? Everyone is digging foxholes, worrying about the future. That's the natural tendency, I know. (Hey, I'm typing this from the warm security of my desk's kneehole, and my cats have gathered around me, prepared to show their fangs to anyone who might endanger their food supply.)
But if you really want to avoid Trouble, the thing to do is to get out there and save your company money, or set it up to make money quickly! Winning enterprises are using this period to prepare to launch at rocket speed out of the recession, leaving their foxhole-dwelling competitors chewing dirt and breathing rocket exhaust. And there's an easy way to help position your company for that launch, at the exact same time that you save megabucks immediately! It's called WAN Performance Optimization.
Yes, the same drum I've been beating for years, this time with extra added incentives!
I'll make this short, so we can all get back to work. But there isn't much to say.
ONE: WAN Optimization really DOES pay for itself in under a year. (In these times, payback in more than a year doesn't impress management at all. You need instant payback, and then big savings.) Those charts showing 50%, 80% and larger bandwidth savings aren't fake. In a surprising number of cases, the bandwidth savings are immense. So you'll be a hero for saving costs, and your procurement department will be singing your praises!
TWO: Your users will be delirious with joy at the performance improvements, especially if they've been suffering with remote file shares or with the pain of sending huge files back and forth among team members. Because it now takes only minutes, not hours, to send project files back and forth, there will be closer teamwork and they'll win more deals and avoid more screwups. Server centralization will be enabled, too, which is more money saved. So you're a hero for improving productivity and morale, and your HR and operations departments and your branch office managers and project managers will be singing your praises!
Just remember to forward all of those love notes to your management; this is not the time to be shy.
The technology can be somewhat complex, so be sure to find some reference accounts with a similar architecture and network design to yours. The vendors will love to show you around the technology, and they'll even loan you equipment to try it out. Different vendors specialize in different optimization situations; it's a good idea to look around. Some leading vendors are:
- Blue Coat
- Certeon
- Cisco (WAAS and AVS)
- Citrix (WanScaler and NetScaler)
- Exinda
- Expand Networks
- F5 (WANJet and WebAccelerator)
- Juniper (WX)
- Riverbed
- Silver Peak
- Stampede
See my previous blog entry, "WAN Optimization Whitelists and Blacklists" for more information on this topic. Burton Group clients should look at my 80-single-spaced-page hyper-boring "Optimizing WAN Performance" report. And in a few weeks a new report, "Evaluating and Deploying WAN Performance Optimization," will be out in print. (Ask me for a pre-production copy.) It talks about how to pitch WAN optimization to management, how to select and evaluate contenders, and how to go through a rollout without crises. Or go to Burton Group's Catalyst Conference, July 27-31 in San Diego, where we're going to have tutorials and sessions on this, and a Birds-of-a-Feather meeting. Or call me for a free "dialogue." Gee, there are lots of ways to get started; no excuses here!
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