Ipanema Technologies, a company that provides WAN Optimization Controllers (WOC), is making available its nano|engine family of low cost, ultracompact devices tailored for branch offices.
WOCs have traditionally focused on addressing high delay, low bandwidth and expensive access lines. They concentrate their feature-set on extremely demanding compression and protocol acceleration. The prices range from US$8,000 to US$20,000 and these devices cannot address the high-speed, low-price branch office market.

“The branch is becoming a focal point of the application delivery chain and the ability to control flows from that perspective is driving a new generation of QoS technologies,” says Joe Skorupa, research vice president of Datacenter Convergence at Gartner, Inc. “Application aware, policy driven dynamic QoS engines that cost-effectively support the complex multi-point traffic flows of the branch will drive WAN optimization adoption over the next two years.”
Application delivery is tremendously transforming branch offices. The traffic originating from private data centers is combining with the traffic from external public clouds and hybrid networks proliferate. Also, Unified Communication is increasing from branch to branch flows and bandwidth intensive usages like hosted virtual desktops and rich media delivery are emerging. Thus, guaranteeing businesses critical application performance is has become even more challenging.
Ipanema Technologies‘ new nano|2 and nano|5 devices target branch offices with up to 20 and 50 users respectively. For instance, its application aware per connection control and dynamic QoS for public and private application flows guarantee a stable user-experience. It has an end-to-end visibility of application performance for each flow with comprehensive KPIs and quality scores.
It also has a dynamic selection among up to 3 networks for optimized path control of multi-attached branches, local Internet breakouts and hybrid networks.

The nano|engine family fits well in B2C sectors such as retail, finance and hospitality. This is very important because slow response times to access customer data or even delays in processing orders dissatisfies customers and would lead to productivity loss. It is in this regard that Nano|engines’ ability guarantees application performance that prevents key applications like Point of Sale and ERP systems from suffering network-related delays.
The nano|engines are components of Autonomic Networking System architecture and managed from the central SALSA platform. They are part of the Ipanema’s autonomic control plane that dynamically orchestrates each application flow end-to-end across the enterprise WAN.
“For the first time, it is possible to guarantee application performance with a global solution that matches all the growing requirements for control including within high speed, low cost branch office situations,” says Frank Lyonnet, VP for product marketing at Ipanema Technologies.
The nano|engine family is available now through VARs/VADs and Service Providers. Large enterprises as well as small and medium enterprises and small and medium businesses can now guarantee their application performance and implement application SLAs for all branch offices and users accessing applications in those offices.