After a period of sporadic growth, deploying MPLS and migrating to a converged network to support VoIP, many budgets and IT staff numbers are now shrinking within organizations.

In order to keep costs in check while ensuring acceptable levels of service, IT departments are commonly turning to point or distributed shaping, compression and acceleration solutions in lieu of adding costly bandwidth.

One step that is commonly overlooked when investigating proprietary acceleration technologies is an independent assessment to quantify the perceived benefits and validate the expected ROI. It is in an organizations best interest to do a pre-assessment, which quantifies the benefits of acceleration or compression prior to a significant investment.

After such technology is deployed, by leveraging the same agile monitoring visibility used to do the pre-assessment, a consistent set of metrics can be produced that provide a validation of the expected ROI.