INTRODUCTION
This document outlines Expand Networks’ proposition to service providers who want to use its market leading WAN optimization technology as a foundation to enhance existing service offerings and/or create a platform for delivering new, differentiated managed services. It summarizes the key elements of Expand’s commercial proposition and details Expand’s WAN optimization service provider offering.
WAN Optimization Procurement – Breaking the Mould
Expand’s new commercial model is unique in the marketplace today, closely reflecting the service provider’s own commercial offering to customers. The new subscription based model is inclusive of all infrastructure, licensing, management and support elements and com-pletely eradicates the need for upfront capital investment, thereby reducing financial burden, freeing up cash flow and de-risking cus-tomer acquisition.
Key highlights:
t All inclusive infrastructure, licensing, management and support t Monthly subscription, charged on a quarterly basis
t Flexible contract terms (2 – 5 years)
The offering, based on Expand’s Virtual Accelerator (VACC), Accel-erator appliance (ACC), and Mobile AccelAccel-erator (MACC) range of WAN optimization products, and managed by its ExpandView Virtual (EVV) solution, enables service providers to move to a more dynamic ‘on demand’ customer driven model . This new approach allows service providers to focus their investment on customer acquisition and service enablement to take advantage of the burgeoning market appetite for ‘as-a-service’ and other on demand, cloud-based offerings. With Expand’s complete end to end WAN optimization offering and
flexible deployment options, service providers can be confident in meeting customer needs around major IT initiatives, including:
t Server based computing t Virtual desktop
infrastructure
t Enable many offerings ‘as-a-service’
t Virtual Bandwidth
t Application Acceleration t Mobility through 3G/4G
networks
t Branch office server consolidation and replacement
Why WAN Optimization?
As businesses increasingly embrace mobility, working-from-home, hosted applications, server consolidation and virtualization, the physical distance between the remote or mobile user and the server hosting applications greatly increases. This creates significant challenges for application performance and user experience as they become increasingly hampered by the bandwidth and latency challenges of the WAN, remote access connections and the mix of traffic types. Because of these factors, the performance of applications delivered to remote user locations can dramatically decrease and the user experience can be severely diminished. This is especially so, when bandwidth or traffic flow is limited, for example 3G or satellite connections. In addition, the bursty bandwidth demands of certain tasks, such as printing, can have significant performance implications. To overcome these issues, businesses need accelerated delivery and guaranteed performance of business critical applications and IT services across distributed enterprise landscapes, whether hosted, virtualized or delivered through cloud environments. As such, WAN optimization with application visibility and control needs to be provided across the WAN from the data center through to branch offices and mobile users.
Expand’s Accelerator solution provides unprecedented application performance improvements and bandwidth reductions using its transparent Real-Time all-IP engine, providing many benefits including:
Visibility, Control & Layer 7 QoS
Virtual Bandwidth and Latency Reduction
t Dynamic L7 prioritization of business critical applications t Monitor & control all HTTP, ICA & RDP applications t L7 Application monitoring
t Enable up to 1000% more traffic over existing infrastructure t Provide enhanced user experience
Expand’s Accelerator solution is a tightly integrated, standards based, multi-service offering that delivers a complete WAN optimization, applica-tion visibility and control soluapplica-tion. Expand’s unique technology optimizes all TCP and UDP traffic, including RDP and other interactive protocols, providing visibility and control of all applications over the WAN. The Accelerators integrate transparently with advanced WAN networking features such as router-based QoS, load balancing, WAN monitoring and MPLS tagging.
Expand Accelerators can be deployed as Virtual Appliances in data centers, branch offices and on PCs and laptops for small remote offices and mobile users. They easily integrate into a virtual infrastructure or cloud based services from user to data center .
The ExpandView Virtual management platform allows service providers to manage the WAN optimization needs of many different customer deployments without having to deploy dedicated systems. ExpandView Virtual is deployed as a virtual application within a virtualized IT infra-structure to deliver efficient and effective services to customers. It overcomes the traditional challenges previously associated with installation, configuration and management presented by heterogeneous hardware environments and operating system configurations, allowing for rapid provisioning, large scale WAN optimization deployments and ease of management.
Expand’s WAN Optimization Offering for Service Providers
WAN Optimization for Telcos
With data and voice convergence, and migrations towards managed IP services, Telcos need to ensure that they can prioritize mission critical applications and enhance QoS with layer 7 visibility and control. Increased competition among telecos means that adding value has become a key differentiator, as does managing network capacity and predicting future usage based on application performance and adoption rates.
WAN Optimization for Cellular Providers
With the increase in enterprise mobility and the build out of 3G/4G networks, business users are purchasing 3G/4G cards or connecting their smart phones to their laptops. However, many users are unhappy with the connected download speeds for their data use and the capped traffic packages which are set to prevent bandwidth hogging. By using WAN optimization, cellular providers can improve the performance of 3G/4G data connections by helping reduce WAN bandwidth and traffic flows, resulting in increased user satisfaction and increased uptake of mobile data services.
WAN Optimization for Satellite Communications Providers (Land, Sea and Air)
With satellite links fast becoming a scarce commodity, Expand’s WAN optimization solution, with its integrated Space Communication Protocol Standard technology, enables satellite communications providers to help distributed organizations overcome the traditional low bandwidth, high latency obstacles that impede the speed and performance of applications and services over satellite links.
WAN Optimization for Managed Service Providers
With the move to branch office and server consolidation, and the increased uptake of hosted services, managed services providers (MSPs) need to provide LAN-like application performance over the WAN in order to improve the productivity of remote users and encourage more uptake of hosted services.
WAN Optimization for Cloud Providers
With WAN optimization, cloud providers can address the market for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) services. Expand’s Accelerator can be deployed as a virtual solution in a virtualized environment. Providing optimization for Microsoft RDP, Citrix ICA, Sun ALP and VMware traffic over a WAN or cloud infrastructure. This enables cloud providers to improve delivery of VDI services to remote branches and mobile users.
Examples of service provider benefits
Telcos / Network Operators
Managed Service Providers
Cloud Providers
Managed WAN, IP, Data, Voice
t WAN Optimization as-a-service revenue streams
t Enable VoIP & Video Conferencing Services
t Increase ARPU revenue t Lock out your competition t Gain footprint at your prospective
customers
t Enhance existing MPLS QoS with Layer 7 Monitoring & QoS
t Differentiated SLAs
t Improve use of network assets t Ease strained 3G/4G, long haul and
satellite links
Managed Hosting Services
t Enable Hosted Services - Server consolidation - Application delivery t Optimize branch offices - File sharing - Print services
t MSP or Customer premise deployment t Increase ARPU revenue
t Differentiated SLAs
t Improve use of network assets t Lock out competition
t Gain footprint at your prospective customers
Optimized Cloud Services
t Differentiate yourself from the usual Cloud Story
t Enable Optimized Service Delivery - Hosted VDI
- SaaS - IaaS - Storage
t Supports Public & Private Clouds t Enable the existing WAN
t Deploy “In-cloud” as a Virtual Appliance t Improve use of cloud assets
Expand’s Virtual Accelerators, Mobile Accelerator Client and ExpandView Virtual is an ideal solution for service providers offering WAN optimization-as-a-service, virtual computing solutions and private cloud services.
Cloud Computing and ‘as a Service’ Models
Cloud computing is an evolving on demand computing environment, which has been born out of virtualization and the ‘as a service’ model. Cloud computing services or ‘as a service’ models can be categorized in a number of ways:
Cloud Application Services or ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS)
Cloud Platform Services or ‘Platform as a Service’ (PaaS)
Cloud Infrastructure Services or ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS)
Service providers offer usage of applications on a subscription basis delivered over a network from servers in a data center. This eliminates the need to install and run the application on the customer’s own servers, reducing CAPEX and simplifying maintenance and support. In a true cloud model, the infrastructure, network, servers and storage are all virtualized.
Service providers provide a computing platform as a service. This facilitates deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers.
For services providers, differentiating and delivering high quality service services goes beyond features, access and availability to encompass application performance and manageability. Therefore understanding the importance of the applications dependency on the infrastructure and WAN connectivity is crucial to success of the service. Given the remote access nature of these application and infrastructure services, it is crucial that performance over the WAN must be comparable to that over a LAN.
Now more than ever, competitive differentiation is key to business success. Enhanced SaaS and cloud application services with service level guarantees, requires application performance and visibility across the WAN connection to deliver better customer service and more cost-effective IT management.
WAN Optimization ‘as a Service’
By providing WAN optimization, application visibility and control, service providers can deliver enhanced managed services and cloud applications services with significant application performance improvements, bandwidth reductions, with unprecedented levels of deployment flexibility, scalability and management capabilities. The solution can be provided as a ‘virtual accelerator in the cloud’ supporting the delivery of application services or offered as a service in its own right as a form of WAN optimization ‘as a service’.
The solution enables service providers to build multiple product offerings based of different feature requirements and/or add value to existing services. Service providers are able to build value add for new services, increase ARPU and generate new revenues.
Building Multiple WAN Optimization services
Build multiple product offerings
t
Customers have different feature requirementst
Increase ARPU and generate more revenuet
Add more value to existing contractst
Build in value add for new servicest
Enable services over the WANThe elements of the Expand solution for MSPs, Telcos and Cloud Providers include:
-t Expand Networks Virtual Accelerator (VACC) or Appliance Accelerator (ACC), deployed at the data center or within the cloud as an image running on a virtual server. Sitting within the virtualized environment, the VACC utilizes existing hardware, shared storage, management, back up policies and configuration tools.
t For small remote offices and mobile users Expand deploys its Mobile Accelerator Client (MACC), downloaded from the cloud to desktops and laptops. It delivers appliance like performance for small offices and mobile users and is fully managed by the cloud provider.
t ExpandView Virtual, is a fully featured management system that is deployed in the cloud to support service provider operations, maximize application performance and manage WAN optimization. It overcomes the challenges associated with large scale deployment, configuration, proactive reporting and alerting across its entire range of physical and virtual accelerator platforms, and within physical or virtual
infrastructure environments.
WAN Optimization Service Enablement made simple
The traditional approach for service delivery is to build and roll out service infrastructure, hardware and software platforms in the hope that customers will take up the demand. Expand Networks infrastructure approach implements an innovative ‘pay as you sell’ model, which removes prohibitive up front build costs and significantly reduces customer termination costs.
Expand’s solution is a service enablement model for
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The pricing model is inclusive of all required virtual Accelerators, mobile clients, feature licensing, ExpandView management and maintenance. This ‘pay as you sell’ approach allows service providers to capitalize on the burgeoning market appetite for ‘as-a-service’ and other cloud-based offerings by providing unprecedented levels of deployment flexibility, scalability and management capabilities.
Summary
Whether you’re a service provider offering managed WAN services, satellite services, hosted services or public/private cloud services, Expand can help deliver value added and differentiated revenue generating service opportunities.
With Expand’s best in class WAN optimization solution service providers can provide guaranteed performance of business critical applications and IT services across distributed enterprise landscapes, whether hosted, virtualized or delivered through a cloud infrastructure or ‘as a service’ environment.
