Escalating levels of traffic are bombarding the enterprise wide area network (WAN) — resulting from the increasing use of IP-based business applications (hosted, shared, and collaborative) and the trend toward centrally managing applications and data centers. In addition, increasing amounts of business-critical data, converged voice, and multimedia applications are sharing bandwidth over this common IP-based network.

These trends are creating major concerns for global enterprises over the indeterminate growth in their network bandwidth requirements. Their IT departments are under constant strain to operate in a “do more with less” environment. Maximizing the use of resources such as bandwidth is now absolutely critical, and WAN optimization offers a method to achieve this.

Some equipment vendors have already incorporated WAN optimization technology into their portfolios, but many enterprises may not want to make the capital investments required to purchase these optimization products plus operationally manage them on a daily basis. Instead, they’re likely to purchase bandwidth monitoring and bandwidth management as a managed service that involves predictable monthly operational expenses. Thus, business and managed service providers—as the experts in WAN connectivity and network infrastructure, and the suppliers of traditional VPN business services—are ideally suited to help enterprises manage network bandwidth optimization for critical, application-centric services.

InfoVista‘s 5View™ Application Optimization Manager provides the in-depth visibility, application monitoring, and reporting capabilities that service providers need to launch revenue-generating optimization services. 5View Application Optimization Manager collects, analyzes, and aggregates data on WAN optimization devices to measure how the WAN optimization service, including Cisco WAAS, is performing—both at the TCP and application layers.