Neotel has launched the first enterprise usage-based wide area network (WAN) services in the South African market.
Abid Qadiri, chief of business solutions and excellence at Neotel, says: “We are excited to be the first service provider to make available this capability to customers in South Africa. In the current economic environment, managing costs while having the flexibility to respond to changing business needs on demand has become increasingly critical to businesses.
“A network infrastructure that is aligned to the business demands is key to delivering the best user experience and desired cost savings for businesses. The Neotel Usage Based WAN service provides enterprises with a connectivity solution that is flexible and scalable without having the high cost burden of static network.”
The latest Ovum report has identified cost management as a key business challenge for CIOs. As a result, many CIOs are now focusing on business system centralisation and application consolidation. However, this raises new challenges around capacity provisioning within the WAN as business systems and applications are reliant on the underlying network.
Usage-based WAN solutions provide network administrators with the capability to support business requirements without over provisioning bandwidths within the WAN. This is facilitated by allowing the customer to burst up to four times the committed bandwidth capacity as they require increased bandwidth – for instance at month end when payments are conducted.
The usage-based WAN service is an enhancement to the Neotel flagship NeoOne service portfolio, converged L2 and L3 Virtual Private Network (VPN) solutions, which has performed exceptionally well since its launch in 2011 with year-on-year growth of nearly 30%. Customers now have a choice to select both traditional fixed bandwidth NeoOne VPN and Ethernet Services and the Neotel Usage Based services. The Neotel Usage Based services provide the same service performance and management capabilities as traditional fixed bandwidth services.