Verizon Business today announced an expansion of its wide-area network (WAN) optimization service, adding Cisco Systems gear to the offer and making it globally available. Previously the service had been available in North America on Juniper Networks equipment.

The need for WAN optimization is growing as enterprise customers scale critical network-based applications for their distributed environments, said Michelle Roos, manager of managed services product marketing for Verizon Business.

“Customers are looking for support of business-critical applications, whether it’s sales-force automation, [customer relationship management (CRM)], or [a human resources] application, it must be working all the time,” Roos said. “We are looking at ways to really improve the performance and the end-user satisfaction.”

A number of normal business practices can create performance issues, however, including global expansion over multiple networks, the growing number of different applications, the desire for data center consolidation, the need to back up and store data and non-business use of networks, which creates congestion, Roos said. “Going global is important, but it can introduce network delays. Many enterprises want to consolidate data centers to reduce costs and power consumption, but creating a central place from which users pull applications can also reduce the performance of those applications. And many times we find enterprises aren’t aware of everything that’s running on their network.”

The purpose of Verizon’s WAN optimization service is to give enterprises tools to let them continually measure WAN and application performance and make changes as needed.

Fundamental to that approach, Roos said, is treating applications as part of the overall network and things to be managed separately. Verizon Business has a five-step process that starts with a detailed analysis of applications and infrastructure and includes: tools to provide metrics to gauge performance, optimization solutions to leverage the infrastructure in the best way possible, security solutions to protect data on the global scale and management solutions that address specific problems.