Return On Investment (ROI)

The ROI of WAN Optimization

There’s no point in investing in a network optimization product if it doesn’t generate enough savings to pay for itself. Traditional WAN optimization controllers (WOCs) often struggle to deliver a meaningful return on investment. Gartner has highlighted this in their research:

“When considering only bandwidth savings, most WAN optimization controller (WOC) deployments can't be justified via traditional ROI approaches.” – How and When to Cost-Justify WAN Optimization, October 2012

The issue is that traditional WOCs have several shortcomings:

• functional limitations: shared caches that achieve hit rates of just 30%-40%.
• finite useful lives: as network traffic continues to increase, they need to be upgraded.
• high prices, driven in part by complex, symmetric deployments.

All of which lead to poor ROI.

Mobolize CacheFront™ is different. Where other WOCs fail, CacheFront succeeds:

• dedicated caches (per user, per site) mean very high hit rates of 60% - 90%.
• asymmetric client software deployment means unlimited scalability and no end-of-life.
• per-user, per-year subscription pricing allows you pay as you grow, with no long term lock-in.

Results

Mobolize CacheFront has been tested and deployed by some of the largest companies in the world. The following data has been collected from thousands of users.

One wireless carrier tested CacheFront for their own internal use and saw the amount of web traffic generated by users on their network drop by 71% compared with using the cache that’s built into Internet Explorer.

It should be noted that this carrier already had a robust WOC deployment in place, and yet, CacheFront was able to generate these traffic savings.

In the test lab of a large platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider, the web traffic reductions were 61%.

An auto manufacturer in the US deployed CacheFront Express to eliminate enough network traffic to make room for the SIP trunking project they had planned. The alternative for them would have been to buy more WAN capacity. When they ran the numbers, they saw that the payback period for CacheFront was just two months, and the ROI was 650%.