More than 50% of European multinational companies are
struggling to guarantee the performance of their applications at a
time when they are expecting 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,
according to the report, which was conducted for network firm
Ipanema Technologies.
IDC questioned 107 large enterprise IT organisations from the
UK, France and Germany.
It found that 72% of organisations questioned 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 them.
Of those surveyed, 88% expected Wan traffic to increase as a
result, with 75% confident that they could cope with the increase,
and 71% intending 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," its report said.
"Although several technologies, such as compression, exist to
improve application performance over the wide area network, most
represent point solutions.
"True Wan efficiency requires a global solution and one that
links application performance requirements directly to Wan
behaviour," said IDC's report.
Ipanema produces application performance management appliances
that can show what proportion of a network's bandwidth is being
used by a particular application, and can dynamically control
this.
Mike Bailey, UK manager for Ipanema Technologies, said, "There
are some performance management tools available, but people are not
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," he concluded.