Trend

Application delivery market soars

It has becomes critical for businesses to increase their speed of operations and remove bottlenecks such as application latency. As companies increasingly outsource work the application delivery market presents an opportunity. By Abhinav Singh

Application delivery and acceleration solutions aim is to reduce application latency while using existing bandwidth to the optimum. There are two aspects to the application delivery market—application acceleration and WAN acceleration. Remote branch offices of Indian enterprises are mushrooming as they expand their reach in the market. They are looking at ways to deploy WAN acceleration solutions to maximise network performance by shifting application chattiness back to the data centre.

The application acceleration market in India, as per the Frost and Sullivan was close to $23 million in CY 2006, and a CAGR of 48 percent till 2008 is projected. Similarly the WAN acceleration market in India was close to $16 million in the same period (CY 2006) and is projected to have a CAGR of 48 percent till 2008.

Faster application delivery

Organisations such as Kotak Securities and Mahindra Finance are leveraging application acceleration and delivery solutions from Citrix Systems. Swapnil R Patil, manager-Information Technology, Kotak Securities, says, “The centralisation capability of application acceleration from Citrix has helped us streamline deployment and management of key applications. Its low bandwidth demands have improved application performance and availability.”

Suresh A Shanmugam, national head-Information Systems and Technology, Mahindra Finance says, “Citrix enables swifter deployment of applications across the enterprise and ensures business agility.”

Outsourcing is the backdrop

Multinational corporations and others in key verticals—telecom, finance, government, education, transportation and manufacturing—are adopting application delivery solutions. Despite relatively lower market awareness, outsourcing opportunities have driven vendors to actively go after this market. Souma S Das, area vice-president, India Sub-Continent, Citrix Systems India Pvt Ltd says, “India is fast becoming an outsourcing hub and enterprises want faster application delivery and want to make their skilled workforce more agile so that they can work in close coordination with their counterparts in other countries. They are embracing application delivery solutions in large numbers. They not only want faster application delivery but they also want a secure application through application virtualisation and optimisation.” Since Indian businesses are growing, every time they add an application it has an effect upon bandwidth utilisation. “Enterprises are looking at solving such issues through application delivery solutions,” says Das.

Sorting out the latency issue

Prasad Babu, director-Systems Engineering and Operations, India, Juniper Networks says, “India is a large country and there are remote locations from where a centralised application is accessed. The latency factor is high and application performance deteriorates. Even if one increases the bandwidth it will not improve latency.” Additionally some remote locations of different banks in India are linked to each other through VSAT links where the latency of an application can be as high as 300 milliseconds. This is where application acceleration solutions can be put to good use.

Technical service provider Vinciti AQ moved some technical support operations from Phoenix, Arizona, USA to Bangalore. Following this, the technical team in Bangalore had to access the Siebel CRM application that was running in the US. The team experienced latency issues while accessing the application and responding to customers back in the States. They also faced accessibility issues—for example, the time taken for a single packet to reach the US from India and return took 300 milliseconds. In comparison, for technical support operations based out of the US, the same packet took just 25 milliseconds to make the journey from the CRM servers in the US to the local office in Phoenix. The company had been accessing its CRM application over an IPLC (International Private Leased Circuit) link from India. The latency over the travel time of the CRM application packet from the US to India was a cause for concern as it was affecting customer satisfaction levels. Additionally, the number of people accessing the server used to reach its peak at night, putting a heavy load on the CRM server leading to slower access. The company was successful in improving its application delivery by using Citrix NetScaler’s application solution which supports packet compression.

Data centre consolidation

With the consolidation of data centres, there has been application consolidation as well. Although organisations in India have an efficient LAN infrastructure, they lack a secure and speedy WAN. To run an efficient DR and BCP set-up and maintain security across these DR sites they need the latter.

Ranajoy Punja, vice president, Business Development (technologies), Cisco Systems, (India) Pvt Ltd says, “The WAN acceleration and optimisation and application acceleration solutions are catching on fast and are becoming a core component of networking solutions on par with security and voice. We see this increased traction for application performance management due to a change in approach towards datacentres, where the trend is to consolidate all the services in a core datacentre with a single Network Operations Centre (NOC) managing these service at a central site. Similarly application, e-mail, file and print servers are accessible from remote locations (within the country or globally) across a WAN, which needs to be optimised for better performance.”

Babu explains, “People want quick access to applications running in data centres from remote locations.”

Thanks to consolidation there has been a need to push towards providing secure access to applications residing at one location. Pranay Jhaveri, sales director, F5 Networks India says, “The need is to have intelligent solutions that manage and consolidate various specialised services or applications in a secure, high performance and always-on manner. What this means is that if you are a healthcare organisation offering remote monitoring services to your patients and e-patient registration and record management services, you need to ensure that access to these services and data is secure, and that the applications are always available for your customer to use at all times, even if the person is travelling anywhere in the world.”

BFSI and BPO take the lead

The banking sector with its various remote branch offices wants better application connectivity across the branch network and BPOs catering to clients across the globe are the early adopters of this technology. The domestic market with its mix of home-grown Indian firms and multinational corporations is an attractive market for application delivery solutions. Jhaveri says, “At the WAN level, such organisations are dealing with the need to provide their mobile constituents–whether employees, partners, vendors or customers–access to enterprise applications in a cost-efficient manner. In such instances, security is critical, speed and performance are always expected and high availability of applications has to be taken for granted, and all these have to be achieved and maintained without high costs.”

Punja says, "We are seeing increased traction from various verticals such as software development houses, offshore development centres and BPO outfits where they keep all the services at one or two datacentres in line with BCP and rest of the remote offices locally or globally access these centres. Keen interest has been shown by the BFSI sector where they have a web of branch offices across a geographical area and all the data is stored securely at a central location which needs to be delivered securely to users using application delivery solutions.”