WAN optimisation has become mainstream for enterprises that need to speed application performance – messaging, financial, sales and marketing applications – across relatively low speed wide area and mobile networks. In the past companies have been forced to install expensive hardware appliances in both data centres and remote locations. But now Replify has cracked the development challenges to bring to market a world first: an all-software based enterprise class solution that straddles data centre HQ, branch office servers, client PCs and mobile devices.
According to Kevin Donaghy, CEO of Replify, “the challenge that enterprises face with distributed applications always relates to bandwidth or latency (and sometimes packet loss). Large companies have attempted to address the problem by purchasing WAN optimisation hardware devices. But these are notoriously costly to purchase, install and maintain – and hardware solutions are costly on the environment too. They consume more power and occupy rack space. Our software solution gets round the inherent disadvantages of the hardware led approach. Server-side, Reptor sits on the customer’s preferred virtual appliance – such as VMWare or Microsoft Hyper-V. The Reptor server-side solution can be configured for the corporate data centre or branch office. A Reptor client-side application is installed in users’ PCs and mobile devices and, hey presto, applications run faster. The network administrator also gets a detailed picture of overall application performance improvement through our Reptor Enterprise Manager.”
The benefits of this approach to the user are huge. Critical business applications run significantly faster over existing network and computing infrastructure. Mobile data charges are also reduced. But, according to Wesley Darlington, CTO of Replify, there are even more important strategic advantages.
“There is more and more demand from the boardroom to reap the advantages that centralised corporate computing can bring – faster reporting and a single view of company performance across regions. This places huge demands on creaking distributed computing networks. However, by adopting our all-software approach to application optimisation across corporate networks, companies suddenly get the advantages that we have built into our solution. In effect we create an optimised tunnel down which application data flows. By adopting Reptor end-to-end our customers achieve vastly improved data services upon which to run distributed information systems. And we all know that unless an optimised infrastructure is in place, corporate apps will just come creaking to a halt.”