Robust Growth Forecast at CAGR of 20.4 percent Through 2014

SYDNEY, 2 July 2008 - The ANZ WAN optimisation market grew at a phenomenal rate in 2007, with market size reaching a total of US$56.4 million. This growth momentum is expected to carry on, in light of the rapid expansion of corporate networks, as well as the exponential growth in demand and requirements of business applications. A CAGR of 20.4 percent is expected throughout the forecast period (2007-2014), reaching a market size of US$207.1 million by 2014.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan (http://www.networksecurity.frost.com), in its study, Asia Pacific WAN Optimisation Controller Market, finds that the market covering 14 Asia-Pacific countries earned revenues of US$204 million in 2007 and estimates this to reach US$844.7 million by end-2014, at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 22.5 percent (2007-2014).

“WAN optimisation appliances address the three major problems associated with remote application performance – high latency, “chatty” protocols and low bandwidth availability. Both Australia and New Zealand are essentially countries operating on less than optimal bandwidth speeds and this, coupled with their highly IT-integrated business environment, has resulted in a growing gap between actual and the desired network performance level. To combat this, enterprises in ANZ have been quick to deploy WAN acceleration solutions on their corporate networks to enhance their performance levels, as well as to cater to the provision of fast and equitable network performance for all remote offices, many of which have disparate bandwidth speeds,” says Frost & Sullivan industry manager, Arun Chandrasekaran.

The financial services, mining, service provider and government verticals emerged as the key spenders on WAN optimisation solutions in 2007. While large enterprises contributed to 73.5% of the overall WAN optimisation market in ANZ, the SMB segment only accounted for 26.5% of the total revenues.

Business applications used to be a ‘good-to-have’ business tool; it is now a mainstay among many enterprises’ framework of business processes and functions in Australia.

Furthermore, business applications are also taking on more key business functions in the process, and this has led to corporate networks being increasingly laden with traffic coming from more such applications, which are becoming more complex as well. This has led to the emergence of WAN optimisation as an effective tool to facilitate the continued convergence between IT and business, whilst maintaining an optimal level of performance.

Chandrasekaran says that WAN optimisation offers substantial savings on operational expenditure by optimising bandwidth usage and speeding-up application access. “With rising budgetary pressures, more organisations are realising the advantage of deploying these appliances over adding more bandwidth.

“While such issues with bandwidth shortage and cost are gradually being resolved, adding bandwidth in itself will not solve the problem entirely since it still does not address the inefficiencies that exist in application transmission,” he adds.

WAN optimisation solutions are also key components of disaster recovery strategy. According to Chandrasekaran, the ability of these appliances to accelerate data centre-to-data centre replication, backups and recovery means that the disaster recovery backup sites are constantly receiving instantaneous sets of data with minimal lag from the primary site.

The Asia Pacific WAN Optimisation Controller Market study is part of the Network Security Growth Partnership Service program, which also includes research in the following markets: network access control, managed security services, data security, content security, and network security quarterly trackers. All research services included in subscriptions provide detailed market opportunities and industry trends that have been evaluated following extensive interviews with market participants. Analyst interviews are available to the press.

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