More than half of European multinationals are struggling
to guarantee the performance of their applications at a time when
they are anticipating application traffic to increase, an IDC study
has found.
Organisations are opting to increase their network capacity
rather than optimising the network to cope with increased traffic,
found the report, carried out on behalf of network firm Ipanema
Technologies.
IDC questioned 107 large UK, German and French enterprise IT
managers. It found that 72% of organisations do not have an
application-centric service level agreement in place to monitor and
manage the performance of their core applications.
Many organisations estimated that the number of applications
that will run on the network will increase, as will the number of
end-users accessing those applications. 88% of European
multinationals expected Wan traffic to increase as a result. Three
quarters said they were confident they could cope with the
increase, and 71% said they intended to increase their network
capacity in the next two years.
IDC said that a rise in outsourcing and datacentre consolidation
has led to the company network carrying more critical
applications.
“Applications themselves have become more diverse and demanding.
A real-time and peer-to-peer application such as voice over IP puts
high demands on the network. Although several technologies such as
compression exist to improve application performance over the Wan,
most represent point solutions. True Wan efficiency requires a
global solution and one that links application performance
requirements directly to Wan behaviour,” said IDC.
Ipanema produces application performance management appliances
that can show what proportion of a network’s bandwidth is being
used by a particular application, and dynamically control this.
Mike Bailey, Ipanema UK country manager, said, “There are some
performance management tools available, but people aren’t generally
able to manage the whole infrastructure. An application is a
constantly changing thing that runs over a network – and usage is
unpredictable. The ability to manage and monitor things end to end
over the Wan is not really there.”