Without inbound QoS technology, a company's alternative would be left to chance: buy more bandwidth, become more reliant on your ISP or, at the very least, hope the actions of your employees won't create bottlenecks.
"Many organizations will set some filters in their firewalls and then manually look up the URL and potentially write another filter, but this doesn't really establish QoS. It just reactively catches problems," says Laliberte. "The nice part about Riverbed's announcement is that it is making it easy for existing customers to simply download and add this capability. With their existing install base, they can cover a lot of ground pretty quickly."
Gartner's Skorupa said he looked at the results of Riverbed's inbound QoS engineering modeling and prototyping nearly a year ago and praised the vendor for doing its homework.
"Don't assume there are well-understood assumptions about what happens when a network has congestion and what one should do in terms of recovery," he says. "Some of the measurements of actual networks that Riverbed shared suggested these really well-understood models aren't necessarily quite accurate. Folklore gets institutionalized ... Frankly, some of the stuff I saw was very counterintuitive to what everybody expects will happen, and I've worked with guys that have built some of the most sophisticated QoS engines the planet's ever seen."
According to Charles King, president and principal analyst at Pund-IT, a lot of companies using SaaS providers such as Salesforce already have mechanisms to make sure their customers are getting the performance that they need.
That may change, however.
"I do think that as the playing field for SaaS and cloud expands, there may be instances where companies would be best served by taking the reins on the problems themselves and deploying a third-party solution like Riverbed's to maintain that quality of service, no matter what cloud or SaaS providers they happen to be working with."
However, King cautions, there could be a potential danger for Riverbed and other vendors as cloud becomes more common and more sophisticated. Will we see cloud and SaaS players driving solutions to QoS-related issues?
"From the end-customer point of view, you'd like to limit the number of companies you're paying for what's essentially the same service. It's not unusual in IT, where specialty players can build a pretty comfortable business by finding a niche," he says. "In this case, it's QoS performance, and that can be eroded or even eliminated by a larger player once it realizes that's a pretty nice piece of business they can take on themselves."
Gartner's Skorupa adds that it's unlikely someone would buy a product simply for the inbound QoS feature, though it's a necessity nowadays.
"It'll be for a combination of inbound and outbound QoS, acceleration and visibility capabilities, and ease of installation and management," he says. "There are some systems that are incredibly feature-rich, but they take about five PhDs just to get the box open. If you have the most sophisticated thing in the world but you can never get the bloody thing up and running, it doesn't matter."
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
