Industry watchers have been predicting U.S. companies will start paying more attention to managed WAN optimization services, which so far have been deployed most widely in Europe and other parts of the globe.

This week two big U.S. carriers made news in this area. Sprint announced the availability of its Sprint Secure WAN Acceleration service, which includes application acceleration and file access services. Verizon Business, meanwhile, announced additions to its existing managed WAN optimization services, including support for Cisco gear.

For companies that don't want to purchase, deploy and manage WAN optimization appliances on their own, managed WAN services from telecom providers such as AT&T, British Telecom, Orange Business Services and Swisscom can provide a welcome alternative. Industry analysts say the benefits of going with a managed service for WAN optimization can include reduced start-up costs, faster deployments, and the chance to avoid configuration hassles (since the service provider does the installation work).

“IDC has seen a growing interest in managed services for both network management and now WAN optimization,” said Tracy Corbo, a senior analyst for research firm IDC, in a statement. “For some enterprise customers it makes more sense to purchase those services through their service provider and channel their own internal resources to other more strategic projects. WAN optimization has moved from 'nice to have' to 'must have' for accelerating enterprise applications and file access in a highly distributed organization.”

Sprint’s new service combines security and traffic management features so businesses can prioritize business-critical applications as well as filter out unwanted traffic. Customers can set policies to boost application response time in branch or remote offices, while throttling back recreational traffic and stopping viruses or malware.

Sprint’s new service depends on gear from Blue Coat Systems, including the vendor’s ProxySG appliances and ProxyClient software. (Compare application acceleration and WAN traffic optimization products.) 

Sprint already offers a number of network optimization options, including class-of-service capabilities, multicast, message protection and DDoS prevention. Its new WAN acceleration services -- via the Blue Coat gear -- add features including bandwidth management, protocol optimization, caching and compression to the mix.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.