Verizon Business Taps Netli for Outsourced Application Acceleration Offer

Verizon Business has partnered with managed services provider Netli Inc. to deliver application acceleration solutions to U.S.-based enterprise customers with operations and customers worldwide. These services are targeted at large business and government customers that want to improve end-user experiences related to IP-based applications such as customer service and support portals, supply chain, consumer and business-to-business commerce, as well as personalized marketing and customer loyalty sites.

The area of application acceleration has become a hot focus in the past couple years as larger vendors like Cisco Systems Inc. and Juniper Networks Inc. have swooped in to acquire other suppliers in the space. The past two years have seen Cisco buy FineGround, following Juniper’s purchases of application acceleration companies Peribit Networks and Redline Networks. Meanwhile, F5 Networks Inc. acquired Swan Labs, and Citrix Systems Inc. entered the market with NetScaler. In a 2005 study, Gartner Group said it expected sales of such products to reach $1.5 billion in 2005 and $2.3 billion by the end of 2009.

For those companies that don’t want to implement such solutions themselves, Verizon Business is offering to do application acceleration on an outsourced basis — and with end-to-end performance guarantees. “We’re taking Netli’s technology and deploying it over Verizon’s backbone and using our personnel for installation and support,” says Rick Dyer, director of product management for IT solutions at Verizon Business, which in May began selling the Application Acceleration service along with add-on options called Application Continuity and Acceleration Portal.

Through Application Acceleration, Verizon Business outsources the management of businesses’ applications to help ensure consistent end-to-end application and service performance.

Willie Tejada, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Netli, notes that anyone using the Internet probably has had the experience of waiting for a Web site to appear, as it builds itself image by image. This slow build is often the result of what Tejada calls the “round trip multiplier,” or the number of trips it takes between the data source and the end user to deliver the content. Netli’s technology addresses this problem by creating a kind of Internet overlay that employs a virtual data center PoP and an application access point PoP to isolate the sometimes-long physical connections between end user and data source, says Tejada of Netli, for which Verizon is its first service provider partner. “So you take away the handshake so you can deliver that same page in two to three round trips versus 30 round trips by taking out the geographical issue,” says Tejada, explaining that customers delegate their DNS process to Verizon to enable the service provider to shorten this application delivery window.

Business and government customers pay for Application Acceleration on a per accelerated region basis, with the options being Australia/New Zealand, China, Europe, Japan, Korea, Singapore, South America, Thailand and the United States, or can buy global acceleration for all regions. The single-region service option starts at $6,650 and includes 5mbps of bandwidth per functional application per month.

Add-on services include Application Continuity, which is designed for organizations with multiple data centers and provides redundancy for applications in the event of server failure or overload. Customers assign rules for performance and availability to enable the automatic shift of traffic between a customer’s data centers based on business policies and priorities. The second add-on option, Application Acceleration Portal, enables businesses to manage, measure, plan and troubleshoot critical applications and business processes deployed on the Internet.