Virtela speeds business apps

Global service provider Virtela today unveiled a new suite of managed services that it says enables faster application delivery and collaboration over a wide area network. Virtela’s WAN Acceleration Service is intended to improve application and protocol performance by two to three times, in order to enable companies that operate globally to overcome distance limitations that can slow performance.

The idea is to tie together far-flung operations, including remote offices that may not have the bandwidth of a headquarters, in a way that doesn’t slow large file transfers or disrupt highly interactive applications, said Bill Dodds, Virtela’s vice president of sales and marketing. Enterprise customers can buy Web optimization appliances on their own, but they are finding this technology to be very complex, he said.

“That’s how we came into this business, we had three to five large clients come to us and say this is a little more of a hassle than they expected, based on the product brochures,” he said. “Also, no one is doing this on a global footprint. They need four-continents, seamless support on these devices.”

While other service providers offer WAN optimization services, those tend to be based on older technology, said Rob Whiteley, Forrester Research analyst. They may do customized deployments of newer Web optimization technology from Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Riverbed and others, but Virtela is the first to fully integrate that technology into its managed services portfolio, he said.

“The actual technology side has gone under some pretty heavy innovation in the last 18 months,” he said. “Virtela has taken its more professional services model, taken the technology and learned to productize it. Most companies do this on a one-off basis. They don’t have the provisioning systems, the support systems, the billing systems you would normally get integrated into a service provider offering. Virtela has done that work already -- they have integrated with provisioning system. So they can offer a more consistent service offering, which helps them control their own costs.”

Virtela’s service is aimed at helping businesses accelerate the performance of their typical business applications from Microsoft, Siebel or Oracle, Dodds said, and is less about Web acceleration.

“We have put this in our standard product portfolio,” he said. “We can take over the devices you own or we can provide boxes for you. You can rent it from us, buy it from us, or rent it yourself and drop ship it to us. We will manage them on your premises or we will co-locate on our premises, or we can have a hybrid kind of view which lets you manage them yourself at data center and we will manage far-flung sales office.”

For about one-third of Virtela’s customer base, the company is a “rest of world” solution, he said. “They do everything for themselves domestically and use us to mimic that off-shore.”

Now that Virtela has blazed the trail, analyst Whiteley expects others to follow, converting their “one-off” implementations of WAN acceleration to more standardized products. “Many times, they like to boldly go where three or four others have gone before,” he said. “I think we will see a lot more service offerings mature.”