Abstract
The demands of business software applications continue to grow and this places ever-greater demands on enterprise WANs (wide area networks). In addition, we are increasingly seeing voice and multimedia supported on the same networks as business-critical applications. However, ensuring that networks are optimised for the performance of demanding applications, and detecting network performance issues before they impact users and business processes can be a challenging task for enterprise IT departments.
Ovum has conducted research with senior IT professionals in 150 large enterprises in Europe and the US to understand these challenges. The research demonstrates the critical role of enterprise networks on the health of the enterprise, and the interest of enterprises in adopting managed services for applications networking optimisation and 24 X 7 network and applications performance monitoring.
Table of Contents
Ovum view
The importance of enterprise networks
The critical role of networking in businesses
- Business applications are the lifeblood of modern enterprises
- Increasing dependence of applications on networking
- The impact of convergence
- Increasing demands on IT departments
- The business impact of poor performing applications
- Ovum survey with large enterprises
The opportunity for managed performance optimisation services
Table of figures
- Figure 1. Key demographics of the survey
- Figure 2. The main WAN technologies used by enterprises in survey
- Figure 3. Types of traffic carried over enterprise networks
- Figure 4. The critical role of networking on the enterprise
- Figure 5. Important staff and resourcing issues
- Figure 6. Current use of performance monitoring tools
- Figure 7. Adequacy of the tools and other information available
- Figure 8. Willingness to pay for additional performance improvement and optimisation features
- Figure 9. Use of third-party managed services for monitoring or optimising the performance of business critical applications?
- Figure 10. Type of managed service provider used for applications monitoring and optimisation
- Figure 11. The major benefits from using a managed service provider/third party to assist in monitoring or improving business critical applications
- Figure 12. Features expected in a managed network optimisation service
- Figure 13. Reasons for enterprises not considering managed services for applications monitoring and optimisation
