Beyond Classes of Service - a new opportunity for Service Providers
Telcos face increasing pressure to offer high-value services that can be provided reliably and consistently. As enterprise customers continue to introduce applications over their WAN, they become increasingly concerned about whether application performance can be maintained and optimized, particularly for mission-critical applications.
Each of these applications has its own application performance criteria. For example, transactional applications such as enterprise resource planning applications exchange little data but are very sensitive to transfer delays, real-time flows such as VoIP require low jitter, and file transfers such as e-mail and FTP traffic are usually less critical and not delay sensitive but they require high levels of bandwidth.
Service providers have been offering their clients various Classes of Service (CoS) as a way to differentiate the treatment of different applications. Although CoS is a step in the right direction, it has a number of limitations that make it a best-effort approach that cannot guarantee the performance of critical applications.
To be able to offer their clients truly application-centric services with Application Service Level Agreements (SLAs), service providers are going to require a new generation of traffic management tool. Ipanema Technologies, through its Business Network Optimization solutions, offers telcos a scalable system that transcends the limitations of CoS and allows them to offer Application SLAs.
