John Gillam, head of AAI at BT Global Services, said the company, which provides WAN connectivity and IT services to corporate customers in the international market, is planning to pull together what we already have in terms of insight on app performance to provide SLAs that can serve as a marker to demonstrate continuous service improvement.

He said the idea is to monitor defects in problem management and determine whether it is a fault or an issue with a BT managed IT service. If it is a recurrent issue, the objective then will be to reduce its frequency as part of the SLA.

This revelation comes just after BTGS announced it had chosen French optimization/acceleration vendor Ipanema Technologies SA to provide the technology underpinning the new Applications Optimization Service within the AAI portfolio. This is a fully managed optimization/acceleration service, which Gillam said need not even be carried out on BT infrastructure. BTGS need not necessarily be providing the pipe, though in the vast majority of cases to date it has been. This is different from the Application-Centric VPN service from BT GS’s sister company in the US, BT Infonet, which also uses Ipanema technology, but in that case it underscores the carrier’s ability to provide an SLA for a specific app, say SAP or Siebel, for instance.

Gillam said BTGS chose Ipanema’s Business Network Optimization System as the basis for AOS because it not only outperformed all competing offerings in lab tests carried out by the UK-based operator, but also it was unique in being able to operate in fully meshed environments. This means that certain apps such as VoIP and the UDP protocol on which it runs require a fully meshed network of optimization/acceleration devices, in which case some CPE kit must be installed at every location from which traffic will be coming. Gillam said others like email and personal web browsing can be optimized simply by deploying virtual engines at all but a central hub, and the Ipanema technology can run in both modes.

He did not specify what other vendors were considered as the technology platform for AOS, but agreed they would have included the usual suspects. Packeteer is probably the best known name that in the space that remains independent (it hasn’t been snapped up by a bigger entity from the world of networking such as Cisco or Juniper), and its technology is in use at BTGS competitor Orange Business Services to underpin its Application SLA offering.

One of its main competitors in WAN optimization was Peribit, now part of Juniper, alongside app acceleration developer Redline. Meanwhile, Cisco has its own optimization technology called Application and Content Networking Software and acquired acceleration last year when it bought FineGround.

An interesting aside in all this is that Orange Business Services itself is rumored to be looking to add Ipanema to its list of technology providers, specifically to address the need for more advanced SLAs as part of its Business Application Management offering. Sources familiar with France Telecom’s WAN services arm said a deal with Ipanema is near but would not mean the French developer was ousting Packeteer from within OBS.