Startup Aryaka Unveils Application Delivery-as-a-Service

Aryaka has launched a new service to help enterprises to get their business-critical applications delivered to their employees efficiently, anywhere they are working, using a high-speed private network that takes advantage of WAN acceleration and other technologies.

The Application Delivery-as-a-Service from Aryaka is the latest product from the 4-year-old company, which has already launched WAN Optimization-as-a-Service and Network-as-a-Service offerings.

Typical WAN optimization requires companies to install appliances in their headquarters and branch offices. These appliances then use techniques such as protocol optimization and caching to improve performance. The Aryaka approach does away with the appliances and instead moves the process to a private network, which customers can connect to via the Internet. The Aryaka network has nodes located at multiple points of presence both in the United States and globally. These POPs are connected via dedicated links.

In addition to routing traffic across Aryaka's private network, the company also employs common WAN acceleration techniques, such as application proxies, data deduplication, compression, caching and TCP optimization. The company claims its network offers latency of less than 20 milliseconds.

Jim Davis, a networks and media analyst with 451 Research, says that overlay services such as Aryaka's Application Delivery-as-a-Service offering can help enterprises improve their networks rather than expanding them.

"Companies are in a cost-savings mode, and optimizing networks is going to prevail over adding network capacity wherever possible," wrote Davis in an email. "We're optimistic about overlay services that provide the benefits of WAN optimization and application delivery in a service model."

The startup is going head-to-head with established vendors such as Riverbed, Silver Peak, Cisco Systems, Citrix, and F5, but Aryaka seems poised to compete. This July, the company received $25 million in a C round of venture funding. In addition, the company's founder and CEO, Ajit Gupta, has experience with improving network performance. He created Speedera Networks, which was sold to Akamai Technologies in 2005.

Aryaka's service is "different from hardware vendors like Riverbed and Cisco in that it has built its technology around the idea they were going to sell WAN optimization as a service, not as a hardware platform to be installed in the branch office," wrote Davis. "Since Aryaka's emergence, there is a lot of activity from networking vendors looking to make a move into the cloud. The result is partnerships between Riverbed and Akamai and between Silver Peak and Dell, to list a few examples."

Recent research from TheInfoPro, a 451 Research service, reveals that "enterprises are looking to manage spending by finding ways to consolidate link providers and avoiding spending on appliances, including the operational expenditures associated with more devices," while maintaining high levels of reliability and application performance, wrote Davis.