Managed Services have been a fixture of the enterprise networking space for quite some time now as telecom carriers and other types of service providers have developed value-added extensions to connectivity services, typically involving the procurement, management, and monitoring of the access devices located at the customer premises. However, a number of business and technology issues are converging to create even greater opportunity in the managed services arena.
There is a new era of networked applications that yields heightened efficiency and productivity for enterprises, provided that the network is properly managed and optimized. Numerous WAN optimization technologies are available to address some of the issues created by today's hypercharged WANs. However, enterprises' attempts to adopt a holistic view that positions applications, IT resources, and telecom services as interdependent components of the business process are often derailed by the lack of in-house personnel, skills, processes, management systems, and end-to-end network visibility. The challenge of supporting today's mission-critical enterprise networks and providing reliable, rapid response times for network-centric business processes and applications on a 24 x 7 basis requires a comprehensive up-the-stack approach that managed service providers (MSPs) are well-positioned to offer.
Melanie Posey, IDC's research director of Telecom Markets, asked Blue Coat about WAN optimization, network performance, application delivery and the role application visibility in managed services in this analyst report.
