Ovum Survey of 150 Large Enterprises Shows That Fewer Than 50% of Enterprises Rate Their Tools “Good” in Maintaining High Performance of Applications on Corporate Networks

Published 7th August 2008

Paris— August 7, 2008 — A study conducted in June 2008 with 150 large enterprises in North America and Europe by analyst and consulting firm Ovum revealed that fewer than 50% of them rate their tools “good” in maintaining high performance of applications on their corporate networks. However, 78% said that a performance degradation of networked applications would have a severe or major impact on their company.

The research showed the highest satisfaction of network performance tools is with business software applications (45%), followed by voice applications (39%) and video conferencing (31%).

“These results suggest that the current approach has some significant limitations,” said Peter Hall, principal analyst in Ovum’s Enterprise Practice and co-author of the report.

The research also found that, as a result, between 65% and 80% of respondents might be willing to pay network service providers more to improve application optimisation. The areas of most interest include:

Improving the quality of service to guarantee performance of business critical applications.

Acceleration technologies to reduce WAN bandwidth and delay constraints for business critical applications.


Moreover, over 53,5% of respondents said they either are, or would consider using, a third-party for monitoring and optimising performance.

According to Hall, “The research demonstrates the critical role of enterprise networks on the health of the enterprise and the interest of enterprises in adopting managed services for applications networking optimisation and 24x7 network and applications performance monitoring.”

Ipanema Technologies, a leader in application traffic management systems for wide area networks, commissioned the survey, although Ovum has an independence charter and the report represents the views of Ovum.

“For many organisations the performance management tools they are using simply aren’t good enough. When you consider that the vast majority of organisations have indicated that the performance of networked applications is critical to their business operations it is clear that application traffic needs to be managed in a much more proactive and dynamic way,” said Béatrice Durand, Marketing Director, Ipanema Technologies. “The statistics also highlight an opportunity for service providers to add value by providing traffic management and optimisation services for networked applications.”

Ovum conducted the research with senior IT professionals in 150 large enterprises in North America and Europe with a minimum of 3,000 employees (more than 1/3 having 10,000 employees) to understand these challenges. An on-demand webcast of Ovum’s Hall presenting the findings can be accessed at: http://www.ipanematech.com/emailing/OVUM2008/Ovum_ipanema.html. In addition, a copy of the complete report can be obtained from http://www.ipanematech.com/eInvitations/ovum-report-2008.