The company’s software and appliances are used to make WAN routing decisions based on near real time backbone performance data, when a company uses multiple ISP links. Users can tune policies to make trade-offs between, say, speed and bandwidth cost.
ANS5 has intelligence about application-level traffic baked into it, CTO Mike Lloyd said. This will let administrators set policies that make smarter trade-offs, he said. Different applications have different sensitivities to loss, jitter and latency, he said.
The software is aware that web traffic is sensitive to loss, and that enterprise applications are more sensitive to packet loss, RouteScience says, while voice over IP and streaming media are both also very sensitive to jitter (variations in the timing of packets).
It’s also now easier to make policy decisions, Lloyd said. All the various metrics taken by the software are now boiled down into a five-star system. A company could decide to set policies to try to always give premium customers four-star or above performance, for example, he said.
RouteScience said the software is available on its PathControl 3000 and 5000 series of hardware platforms starting at $15,000 and $55,000 respectively.
The company recently altered its business model somewhat to look to OEMs as well as sales of PathControl. ANS was decoupled from the hardware, and will be distributed to the OEM channel. A blade strategy may also be in the works.
The switch came about mainly due to two big deals with resellers that had access to other hardware platforms, IBM Global Services and Avaya, Lee-Thorp said. The company expects to see 35% of revenue from channels this year, increasing to more than 50% next year.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
