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Desire for speed in application delivery comes from three significant drivers: the natural impatience of users, the richness of modern applications and the rationalization of IT architecture.
- We, as human being, are impatient animals. Knowing that our time is limited brings a huge psychological pressure on each of us. Waiting more than a few seconds behind a static screen (web specialists said 8 seconds 10 years ago, they say 5 seconds today, what will it be in 10 years when a new generation of young people accustomed with electronic gaming and all kind of frantic toys will enter the business?) creates a sense of frustration that makes users unhappy.
- Modern applications become richer and richer. Sophisticated Web design tools enable software editors as well as enterprise process designers to write applications with complex interactions between clients and servers. Fancy screens with embedded images and video increase the amount of information to be exchanged.
- IT centralization is a fundamental trend of today's modern IT architecture. Enterprises need simplification, for cost reason (less hardware, less operation staff, less software licenses...) but may be more fundamentally to simplify operations and concentrate on their main business. Virtualization, cloud computing and modern networking techniques (like Wan optimization and broadband accesses) make it possible.
Enterprises live in a permanently changing environment, where technology, finance, products, partners, customers, competition are moving faster than their production infrastructure and people's culture. IT has been and will remain a key enabler of adaptation to these fluctuations, and supports most of business processes of modern enterprises. This is the source for such a strong need for certainty in IT: managers expect a predicable efficiency that they can rely on and adjust to evolving requirements, at each minutes of every hour of every day.
The classical technical approach to enable enterprise face their 'optimize AND maximize' challenge is based on specialized solutions (e.g. acceleration, shaping, SLAs, etc.). While each of them provides what they have been designed for (no more, no less), none is able to solve the entire problem – for example accelerating an application would likely put the other ones at risk, just like a too speedy car will create accident on the motorway. Moreover, the cost and complexity of combining solutions are way too high to consider it as a good candidate in most cases.
It is then natural to select technologies that integrate all the required features in such a way that they could closely interact to provide the expected benefits (speed and certainty) at the same time. Combined under the 'always tuned' umbrella of a well-designed Autonomic Networking solution, they provide an exceptional association of stability with high level of performances. At least, a 'martingale' that works?
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