Wan optimisation: Niche No More

New Zealand businesses are continuing to look for ways to save money and that spells good news for resellers of WAN optimisation technologies, says Ian Raper, Riverbed regional director for Australia and New Zealand.He says the sector, previously very much a niche market, is ‘growing exponentially because of the high level of cost savings that can be demonstrated’ through using the technology."Four years ago customers couldn’t explain what WAN optimisation was. People were confused by the whole thing,” Raper says. "But the niche we operate in is getting clearer and clearer to people. The marketing has been confusing, but now people are very clear on the technology.”He says overall industry trends, including the desire for cost savings and the move to consolidation, outsourcing and the cloud, ‘are driving our business harder and harder’."New Zealand is still struggling in terms of the macro-economy. People are looking for ways to save money and they’re only spending if they can save money really quickly. We can demonstrate real cost savings from WAN optimisation and application acceleration,” Raper says. "We can make performance problems on the network go away, or at least be vastly reduced."Applications and data can be somewhere a long way away and we can make applications behave as if they’re local.”While Raper says he’s not allowed to talk specific figures for the New Zealand market, globally the company is growing at 40% per annum, ‘and I’m very comfortable with the local numbers in comparison’.Across Australia and New Zealand, Riverbed has ‘well over 600 customers’. "The market is growing very fast for us,” he says. He says Foster & Sullivan recently estimated Riverbed’s market share at 74% of the WAN acceleration market space.The company has about 25 partners in New Zealand, ranging from large organisations including Gen-i to small, specialist value-added resellers. "We want to enable and support our partners to be successful.”Raper says ultimately the company would like to have New Zealand-based staff.