Verizon Business today announced new Application Acceleration Services that enable businesses to deploy Web-based applications globally without suffering any latency or degradation of service.

Aimed at large businesses and governmental units who increasingly depend on Internet productivity and e-commerce software solutions, the new services used proprietary software from Netli to essentially create a fast lane through the Internet, connecting application access points and what Verizon terms “virtual data centers” within its network. Customers can use the new service without making any changes to their applications software and make sure that users dispersed globally have a quality experience not impacted by network latency.

“Today, there are performance limitations based on how the applications are deployed,” said Rick Dyer, director of product management, IT solutions for Verizon Business. “The further away you are, the worse the performance is. Enterprises want to give the end user a better experience .”

By using Verizon’s Application Acceleration Services, enterprises can still leverage the power and reach of the public Internet to deliver applications to dispersed locations and get a higher level of service.

“CIOs and IT managers want to be able to provide a consistent end-to-end application and service performance,” Dyer said. “They want the applications to appear as if the users were on a LAN. And they don’t want to experience downtime from unplanned changes.”

Other approaches, such as adding bandwidth or distributing data centers, are more expensive and add management complexity, he added.

What Verizon and Netli have done is to embed Netli’s Application Acceleration Engine into the Verizon Business global IP network.

“The software is deployed at two points of presence – an application access point and a virtual data center,” said Willie Tejada, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Netli. “That eliminates the need for any changes in the client-server software. At the end points, the service uses standard Internet protocols – HTTP, TCP – but in the middle of the network it uses proprietary Netli protocols.”

Normally, Web applications communicate in message bursts of about 200 milliseconds, Tejada said, but complex applications can require multiple “round trips” to build the application and this is what causes latency and delay in performance, depending on the number of Internet router hops that separate the user from the application site. By using Netli’s proprietary software in the heart of the network, that process is greatly accelerating, reducing the number of back-and-forth messages required to enable the application.

Verizon’s suite of Application Acceleration Services includes a standalone Application Acceleration Service and add-on services to provide Application Continuity for control over a multi-data center environment, and Application Acceleration Portal for measurement and control of the performance of applications.

The Application Continuity service is designed for companies with multiple data centers to enable simple fail-over service, orderly upgrades, and efficient use of resources by shifting traffic among centers depending on policies and other business requirements. The Application Acceleration Portal provides continuous performance measuring and monitoring and gives enterprises visibility into network performance to enable management and troubleshooting of critical applications.

The services are immediately available for U.S.-based customers, at a base-level of $6,650 a month. The service is price on a “per accelerated region” basis, increasing with the number of global regions included.

“This service also is the perfect complement to our managed hosting service,” Dyer said.