Early-stage software house Replify claims to be taking business from customers of appliance-based WAN optimisation suppliers with its software-only application acceleration product line.
Replify claims its Reptor Acceleration suite can offer up to 98% reduction of HTTP bandwidth usage across a network, at a cost that is 20% to 30% cheaper than comparable hardware options.
Founded in 2007 by Kevin Donaghy and Wesley Darlington, who sold Swan Labs to F5 Networks in 2005 for $45m, the company developed around what it saw as a niche for the first all-software based WAN optimisation offering.
Products like those produced by chief competitor Riverbed, Blue Coat, Cisco or Citrix produce similar outcomes to Reptor, though the software-only option is cheaper because it is much easier to deploy and maintain than any hardware appliance, Susan Fitzsimmons of the Belfast-based business told us.
It installs using VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V at the server-side, and a standard Windows/Windows mobile application at the client end.
Typically it would be installed at a data centre, with the Reptor Enterprise Manager controlling configuration and policy management across any number of branch office virtual appliances and fixed or mobile client end points.
The cost of the data centre software starts at around €3,700, with each virtual appliance costing €1,850 and a client licence carrying a price tag of €185.
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WAN optimisation has pretty much become a mainstream technology for businesses with multiple regional offices that want to guarantee the speed and performance of applications used for messaging, financial, sales or logistics, while avoiding issues of latency and other bandwidth constraints.
VC-funded Replify provides its software for on-premise deployment, but has also signed with several managed service providers to supply it out of a hosted data centre. Fitzsimmons said the business has around 1,500 accounts.
CBR learned last month that Replify rival Riverbed Technology has plans for software-only WAN optimisation, and is said to be working with public cloud service providers on ways to run a virtual instance of the Riverbed software, and provide that as a cloud optimisation service.
Bob Gilbert Director of Marketing for Riverbed told us then,“We have a very portable acceleration infrastructure which can be deployed at the data centre, at the branch office and on the laptops of mobile workers. There is no reason we can’t take our Steelhead appliance footprint and move it into the Microsoft Azure cloud or to Amazon’s S3 public cloud.”
