Web Client Accelerators Evolve into Cloud Applications Acceleration

Brian Washburn

Summary Bullets:

• The underlying caching and content acceleration concepts developed by turbo-charged dialup Internet services have found new life, addressing unpredictable wireless connectivity.
• These tools had a low profile among enterprises until Sprint Cloud Optimizer, which improves the Microsoft Office 365 experience for roaming workers.

Anyone who has been following Internet trends in the past decade will likely remember web accelerators, which stretched the shelf life of dialup and low-speed broadband Internet access. These services were installed on desktop computers and used a combination of tricks – such as prefetching and caching content, compressing images and data, and optimizing TCP – to achieve a perceived fivefold or greater performance throughput. A similar grouping of caching and acceleration technologies launched the WAN optimization business, using dedicated devices at the customer premises.

U.S. Mobile Operators Fall into Two Camps, Relating to Target Segment

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  Kathryn Weldon

  After completing our bi-annual set of enterprise mobility briefings from the four major U.S. mobile operators, it is clear to Current Analysis that they are separating into two “camps”

• AT&T and Verizon (while also having SMB and mid-market product strategies) have their eyes primarily focused on the enterprise, and increasingly, the MNC; Sprint and T-Mobile may dabble a bit in all segments, but now state overtly that their sweet spot is the SMB and mid-market customer

All four major U.S. mobile operators can theoretically attract business customers of all sizes and verticals, including MNCs with U.S. operations. While perhaps it has been obvious all along, however, Sprint and T-Mobile are now very clearly stating that they are really targeting the SMB and mid-market customer. They may attract an enterprise here and there but these deals are more opportunistic. Making this clearer is actually helpful – it is not fair to judge Sprint and T-Mobile against AT&T and Verizon for successfully drawing a large enterprise or MNC customer base. Sprint and T-Mobile lack not only the fixed line infrastructure (although Sprint still has a global MPLS network and offers U.S. wireline services such as Ethernet and IP VPNs) but they lack the resources relating to large managed and professional services groups, significant hosting infrastructure, global sales personnel, giant global data centers, managed security services, deep vertical expertise, consulting etc.). In fact Sprint and T-Mobile are proud of this positioning. T-Mobile’s disruptive ‘Un-carrier’ strategy centers around the shaking up of the industry with programs that include the removal of annual contracts, the end of global roaming charges, free tablet data, paid-off ETFs from other carriers, and a growing set of innovative price plans and services. Both Sprint and T-Mobile still offer unlimited data plans and Sprint is building out not only 4G LTE, but its own superfast version that leverages its three spectrum bands.