Yankee Group Mobile WAN Optimization Report

Mobile WAN Optimization Can Help Cut
Costs and Avoid Future Upgrades
by Zeus Kerravala | June 2009
Executive Summary
Mobile work continues to evolve. What was once limited to laptop-carrying professionals working outside of the office has expanded to encompass a much wider range of users and use cases. While iterant professionals remain an important group of mobile workers, they are hardly the only one. Home-based workers and locations where multiple users share a single device (i.e., a retail location) are two additional examples of the broadening definition of mobile work. This explosion in mobility and the increasing number of ways to connect with the corporate network has created an IT environment that is very difficult to manage and that leads to inconsistent user experiences. Mobile WAN optimization can help overcome these challenges by improving the performance of critical enterprise applications, which lowers the cost of effectively supporting mobile workers and eliminates the need for many organizations to pursue expensive upgrade strategies.
This report introduces the concept of mobile WAN optimization and provides three case studies that highlight how this emerging technology can help IT departments achieve what previously appeared to be conflicting goals. Each demonstrates how mobile WAN optimization leads to projects that have a fast payback, improve productivity and cut costs. The following three case studies highlight the impact that mobile WAN optimization can have on organizations:
. RCM Capital Management leveraged mobile WAN optimization to provide 24/7 instantaneous access to information to its high revenue-generating global asset managers. The deployment reduced the cost of IT support and allowed the firm to avoid a costly network upgrade.
. The management consulting company, PRTM, was able to eliminate the need to construct new data centers and reduced the cost of supporting their mobile workers by significantly improving the performance of their critical enterprise applications through mobile WAN optimization.
. Einstein Noah Restaurant Group (Einstein) deployed mobile WAN optimization to more than 400 locations and 200 remote workers to improve retail operations through the optimization of a Microsoft SharePoint portal. The project enabled Einstein to avoid close to $600,000 in bandwidth upgrades and reduce the cost of training by almost $34,000.
These three case studies represent vastly different types of organizations and business models. However, this variety of deployments demonstrates that mobile WAN optimization can help almost any company improve the performance of critical applications for remote workers while also significantly cutting corporate IT costs.
This custom publication has been sponsored by Riverbed Technology.
© Copyright 2009. Yankee Group Research, Inc. All rights reserved.Mobile WAN Optimization Can Help Cut Costs and Avoid Future Upgrades
Table of Contents
I. The Explosion of Mobile Workers 2
II. An Introduction to WAN Optimization 4
III. Case Studies on Mobile WAN Optimization 4
IV. What to Look for in a Solutions Provider 9
V. Conclusions and Recommendations 10
I. The Explosion of Mobile Workers with T1 speed (1.5 MB) or lower. This means the branch worker is often connected to applications with speeds that are more than The concept of an Anywhere Enterprise® as defined by Yankee 600 times slower than the corporate developer or a worker located Group is a simple one-an Anywhere Enterprise enables corporate in the corporate headquarters. This difference in performance users to work anywhere using any device. However, although the creates a massive discrepancy in user experience. The impact of vision and concept is simple, its implementation is still very difficult this difference in speed is compounded by the fact that workers are for two primary reasons. The first reason revolves around creating spending even more time away from the office as well. According to a consistent user experience. Workers today can exist in a variety the survey data, workers spent up to 23 hours a week on average of locations. The Yankee Group Anywhere Enterprise-Large: 2008 outside of the office. This inconsistent location of workers means U.S. Mobile Blended Lifestyle Survey foun... [download for more]