From April through to June 2008, we interviewed IT users and IT decision makers across the world to find out what they thought about network performance*. The results confirmed our fears that network performance is far from optimal. We found low user expectations, network delays adding up to days of lost time, and a subpar response and capability from IT to address the challenge.

Q: What type of improvement will I see when deploying optimisation technology?
A: There are different scenarios here, some traffic types will see speed improved by over 100 times whilst other traffic types will see speed improvements of between 5 and 10 times.

Q: What is the difference between a WOC and an ADC?
A: A WOC (WAN Optimisation Controller) is technology that provides a set of functionality to speed up applications over WANs.  An ADC (Application Delivery Controller) is a device that is installed in the data centre and provides load balancing, security, translation and offload functions to increase availability and accelerate application delivery.

Q: What is a SoftWOC?
A: A SoftWOC is software that provides Performance Optimisation functions for remote desktops and laptops, providing a subset of the features of a hardware WOC to speed up applications delivery to remote users.

Q: Will installing WOCs on my network cause a loss of visibility for my management systems?
A: It depends how the devices are installed into the network. Most WOC devices can be installed in a variety of ways and it is possible to deploy these devices so that they are completely transparent to the network and the network management systems, whilst still delivering Performance Optimisation functions.