The company in question provides financial services including managing client’s tax affairs.  They use a popular and powerful application and like its features.  In the office it works very well.  Try to use it from home, or client premises, and it will try to start but after about 30 minutes it will time out and fail.   The problem is that it is a thick-client app and pulls a lot of data across the network to do its job.  There is a thin-client web-based alternative but it isn’t as powerful or friendly and the users don’t like it.

So they tried Replify Accelerator.  All a user has to do is to launch the app once from the company’s network and thereafter they can launch it remotely across the network. It takes about three minutes to start – round about the same length of time it currently takes Microsoft Outlook to start on my PC at work.  A slight delay that the users happily accept in return for having access to the full power of the application.  Traditional WAN Optimization with its focus on hardware, sites and shared caches just doesn’t get there.

Imagine that same application running in the cloud.  Now even office-based users have the same challenge – but Replify Accelerator on each PC provides an easily-affordable solution.   I’m sure you believe me, but just in case… you can view a short video of a user successfully launching the app from home.

It’s a big step for them to take. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, and the Turkeys that make a lot of money selling very expensive hardware have been sticking their heads in the sand for a while when it comes to recognising the dramatic change that cloud computing is going to make to their business (I may be confusing Turkeys and Ostriches here, but they’re both large, dumb, flightess birds, so close enough).

We’re well down the road to a world where everyone is an individual roaming user, untethered to any particular location, and where all the applications and content is somewhere in the cloud.  In that world, a hardware based approach to WAN acceleration just doesn’t play.  It might be possible to sustain a market for data center WOCs but it would require standardisation, and the technology is evolving too fast for that. 

It’s not just that we’re moving to virtual site appliances. No, no – we’re going to shoot way past that.  No site appliances at all – just co-operating devices.   Another competitor has been messaging for quite a while on this possibility – messaging for so long that you have to wonder if they’re having trouble getting it working.  Well even if they fail, we don’t intend to, and our CLAN feature (Co-operative LAN – and I didn’t even get to take the rest of the day off for thinking it up) is going to deliver the benefits of a WAN Optimization appliance without the cost or complexity of deploying one. 

The average PC/laptop has plenty of spare processing power and disk space, and we’re going to enable those devices to dynamically form clans and share their caches.  We’re  pretty excited about it and we know from conversations with existing customers it’s exactly what they’re looking for. We’ll be commencing trials early 2011 with first release around March.  If you’re interested in taking part, get in touch.

Consider a typical small company,  with maybe 5 servers, each with 100Gb of data.  If you back-up, or mirror this data into the cloud you might be generating 25Gb of data per server per day.  That’s $25 per day in data transfer charges.  Every day. Of every week. Of every month. Over $7000 per year. For a small company. And that’s on top of the actual storage costs.

Now don’t get me wrong,  I’m love the idea of backing up data into the cloud – it IS cost-effective and has lots of benefits over owning and managing the storage, physical security and essential remote copies of all your corporate data, but the transfer charges are a significant tax on the service.  But there is some good news here both for users of cloud back-up and for Replify (but not the cloud storage vendors)- our virtual appliance can be deployed into the cloud (in fact we have an Amazon VA image ready to go) and it will squeeze the back-up data by 50% or more.  So you can either deploy your own Replify Accelerator, or you can rent back-up acceleration on pretty irresistable terms – for example we charge you 2 cents per GB transferred but you save 6 cents on your data transfer, so you can’t lose. No upfront costs – savings all the way. If you don’t save anything, you don’t pay anything. It’s not often that you get such a simple proposition.

“We are very excited to be adding Replify’s Accelerator product to our x60 WAN Optimization Appliance solution. We believe Replify’s software approach provides a powerful, cost effective application acceleration enhancement for a mobile workforce.  The Replify solution fits easily into our virtual machine environment and demonstrates the first example of how organizations deploying Exinda appliances will be able to reduce WAN data effectively whether to a branch office or remote worker.” said Kevin F. R. Suitor, Exinda’s vice president of marketing. “The software-only approach allows Exinda to provide customers with much improved user experience for mobile clients and can be deployed on an Exinda x60 Appliance virtual container, risk free in minutes. We are delighted to have the Replify product as part of our portfolio.”

- Full 64 Bit client support

- Enhancements to increase still further our effectiveness in reducing Double-Take bandwidth needs

- Performance enhancements which allow the Virtual Appliances and Enterprise Manager to support significantly more users. This release has been extensively exercised in a 900 site, 25000 client deployment over a period of three months.

All customers currently in support are entitled to upgrade and should do so. Release notes available from the download site.