Activ Australia to offer Expand's WAN optimisation products

Stuart Corner
Friday, 10 November 2006 00:59

Your IT - Home IT

IT services provider, Activ Australia, is to offer Expand Networks' portfolio of wide area network optimisation products into the SME market under a new strategic partnership.

Expand Networks provides wide area network (WAN) optimisation services, quality of service (QoS) and wide area file services (WAFS) solutions to enterprise organisations. According to Activ,  the Australian WAN optimisation market is currently worth $50 million annually but is expected to grow significantly with the uptake of software as a service by small to medium businesses, as they seek to reduce cost and complexity and optimise in their existing infrastructure.

CEO Tim Watson, said:  "Quality of service (QoS) alone is not the answer. Clients demand real-time performance and the ability to use priority-based traffic to solve congestion problems: Expand's solutions give us the ability to deliver both."

As a Platinum Partner for Expand Networks, Activ, which is being acquired by Access Providers (ASX: APV)  will offer Expand's application acceleration services as part of its managed services portfolio and will also offer Expand's Wide Area File Services (WAFS) to businesses that want to consolidate remote infrastructure and file servers. Claimed benefits include granular application prioritisation, server consolidation, business continuity and data compliance. Activ also claims that all services will be fully compatible with its business grade QoS and MPLS private networks, Citrix deployments, Internet and hosted application services.

Expand Networks, founded in 1998, claims to be the leading WAN optimisation company with over 1400 customers and over 27,000 units installed globally, and was one of only three vendors placed into the leaders quadrant by Gartner in its recent Magic Quadrant assessment of WAN optimisation vendors, along with Juniper Networks and Riverbed. F5 Networks, Blue Coat Systems and Citrix were placed into the Visionaries quadrant and Packeteer and Cisco rated as challengers. A further eight were labelled niche players.

Gartner said: "The WAN optimisation controller market is rapidly maturing, but it is still dynamic with a high level of vendor innovation. This has led to different vendors offering different combinations of features." This, it said, presented a challenge to users trying to select the most appropriate solution.