Expand Begins ‘Pay As You Sell’ WAN Optimization Plan 
Expand Networks is looking to jumpstart channel demand for wide-area networking optimization with a pay-as-you-sell pricing model for service providers, telcos and public/private cloud providers. The new pricing arises from Expands’ aggressive adoption of virtualization techniques for WANs.
Expand Networks is redefining wide-area networking optimization package with a pay-as-you-sell pricing model to promote new business development for service providers, telcos and public/private cloud providers.
The new pricing approach arises from Expands’ aggressive adoption of virtualization techniques for WANs.
Expand provides “virtual bandwidth” using compression and caching technologies architected to deliver four to 10 times throughput capacity over the same Wide Area Links infrastructure. The technologies support several key enterprise bandwidth needs, including:
- Generic WAN Optimization
- Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
- Server Based Computing
- Satellite Communications
- Branch Office Server Consolidation / Replacement
Expand’s officials hope their new pricing structure will promote growth and new business models among WAN and cloud services providers, by taking the risk and CapEx out of go-to-market considerations.
“By moving from a ‘build it and they will come’ approach to a customer-driven model, we can completely de-risk service providers customer acquisition strategies, only having to invest in a solution as and when they actually sell it,” Adam Davison, Expand's VP sales and marketing said in a statement.
Expand’s pricing features a monthly subscription approach, and offers SPs, telcos and cloud providers “as-needed” flexibility for infrastructure capacity, licensing, management, maintenance and even length of contract.
“Unlike other competitive offerings where traditional enterprise pricing models have been retro fitted for the service provider market, our approach has been purposely developed to be a true subscription based service as opposed to a deferred CAPEX model,” Davison added.
Expand’s new subscription approach is what the company called an “all-inclusive” package, including accelerators, licensing, management and maintenance. Fees are charged on a quarterly basis over a 2-5 year contract term, Davison said.
Expand is also launching its new Managed Service Provider partner program, and is looking for service provider partners (MSPs, telcos and cloud providers) that are designing, building, implementing and managing services to end user organizations, according to company officials. The benefits to service providers that participate in the program include discounts, technical support services and access to sales and marketing resources.
Inside Expand Networks’ Use of
Virtualization for WAN Optimization
Expand’s WAN optimization offerings is based on a standards-based, multi-service scalable platform. The company combines virtualization, caching and compression technologies to deliver what it calls a “virtual proximity” experience to boost performance by putting users in closer proximity to data and applications.
“No longer will point solutions delivering just QoS [Quality of Service] or compression meet the real needs of IT organizations. The mandate is changing from WAN management to high performance application delivery; a change brought about with the requirement to link business productivity to application performance,” the company said.
Two key aspects of Expand’s architecture approach are compression and caching.
Compression – Expand balances the needs for analyzing traffic for compression and how that analysis can interrupt flows – and cause queuing and latency. The company’s compression technology uses low latency, lossless techniques that can deliver average bandwidth increases between 100% and 400%, with peaks well over 1,000%. The low-latency approach allows the technology to be used for even difficult interactive applications including Server Based Computing, Virtual Desktop Infrastructures, and VoIP.
Caching – Expand’s caching technologies ensure no duplicate or predictable traffic is required to traverse the WAN, maximizing utility of limited bandwidth. For instance, the byte-level caching uses both de-duplication and predictive algorithms. Working at the byte level allows the technology to work with even small packet types (Citrix Zen, MS Terminal Services).
Jim Metzler, an analyst at Ashton, Metzler & Associates said Expand’s announcement is another indication that virtualization is changing the way service providers, telcos and cloud providers will acquire WAN optimization solutions.
