Nemertes Impact Analysis:

Net Neutrality Rules Highlights Growing Teleworker Challenge

The FCC's announcement of new rules to enforce "Net Neutrality" highlights the challenges in delivering applications over public Internet services to a rapidly growing teleworking population. Proposed rules would require Internet providers to treat all traffic equally; meaning neither ability to restrict bandwidth-clogging applications nor any ability to prioritize a provider's own services over those of competitors.

Nemertes finds 86% of companies are planning to increase the number of teleworkers. Proposed Net Neutrality rules may hinder their ability to utilize latency sensitive applications without purchasing a business-class service with performance guarantees. Uses of client-based optimization as well as desktop virtualization are likely to increase.

Impacts:

Enterprises: Do not continue to assume that your employees will always have cheap access to high-speed residential services. Develop contingency plans that include purchasing of business class services, use of optimization, and/or desktop virtualization to guarantee application performance.

Vendors: Expect increasing demand for optimization and management tools to support teleworkers, build out your portfolio via home-grown products, acquisition, and/or partnership

Investors: Optimization and virtualization vendors including Blue Coat (NASDAQ:BCSI), Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO), Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS), Juniper (NASDAQ:JNPR) and Riverbed (NASDAQ:RVBD) are likely to see growth.

Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research

http://www.nemertes.com/benchmarks/communications_and_computing_2009_benchmark [1]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125329467451823485.html [2]

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