Monday, March 29, 2010

What is the Biggest Intangible Benefit of WAN optimization?

WAN optimization technologies have many benefits, some easily measured and others that are intangible. The latter might be more important to the organization. Many customers tell us that they realize both tangible and intangible benefits from deploying Cisco WAAS. Tangible benefits include reduced or avoided bandwidth costs, reductions in branch office servers and a reduced branch office equipment footprint. These cost savings are realized since Cisco WAAS eliminates duplicate data transmission, enables branch office server consolidation and integrates with the Cisco ISR router. These tangible benefits can be fairly easy to measure as we shall see. Intangible benefits can be more difficult to measure, but they can often be more compelling. Let’s look at an example of a customer who has experienced both types of benefits.

Recently a customer told us that they expect to save $400,000 per year by deploying Cisco WAAS. Brisbane Australia based mining and heavy equipment supplier Hastings Deering says they achieved a rapid ROI with their WAN optimization project that connects their data center and remote office locations. The Hastings Deering Group sells and supports Caterpillar heavy equipment used in the mining and construction industries across Queensland, the Northern Territory and the South Pacific region, including Papua New Guinea. With a network of 65 nodes connecting to corporate applications in Brisbane, CIO John Birch says there was a constant battle to keep branch response times low for all its applications. “About 18 months ago we decided to take a look at network options other than just increasing bandwidth and we started exploring WAN optimization products”