UPM is a new and evolving open standard that defines the components required to effectively manage the performance of a wide breadth of applications that organizations use to do their business across wide area networks (WANs), including the Internet. It incorporates all facets of WAN optimization, application acceleration, application visibility, application response time measurements and a ubiquitous global management facility. UPM fulfils both the technical and commercial requirements for a broad and scalable market adoption.
Exinda foresees UPM delivering an open framework for the ubiquitous availability of all WAN acceleration functionality to every user on every network globally.
Having recognized that application acceleration alone is not capable of resolving the WAN performance and productivity challenges facing enterprises and small-to-medium enterprises today, Exinda has created UPM.
With the introduction of Exinda’s new WAFS and CIFS acceleration on its x800 products Exinda say they are the industry’s first vendor to meet the UPM standard.
"Exinda’s Unified Performance Management is the natural evolution of technology for the acceleration market space," said Michael Grace, Exinda’s vice president of international business development. "Exinda has integrated all the effective features and functionality required for complete WAN acceleration, which is otherwise only available on multiple platforms of other vendor’s partial solutions."
"In three years we should be seeing all IP communications transparently accelerated between vendors’ platforms. However, an open standard such as UPM will be required to make this possible," Grace concluded.
In October, 2006, Gartner analyst Mark Fabbi asserted that companies should use WAN optimization tools to reduce network traffic, rather than purchase more bandwidth. According to Fabbi’s calculations, WAN optimization tools can slash traffic by 60 to 80 percent. Bandwidth needs will continually grow by 35 percent a year, but when this is factored in, the use of WAN optimization tools allows a company to defer the purchase of additional bandwidth for 3.5 years.