London, ENGLAND — Results of a survey released Thursday indicate
that businesses in the U.K. and The Netherlands are embracing
IP-based Virtual Private Networks and turning away from Wide Area
Networks.
400 UK and Dutch businesses were quizzed in a survey conducted
by analyst firm IDC on behalf of managed IP services provider
ipulsys, a company owned by venture capitalist Warburg Pincus.
Currently, 60 percent of U.K. companies use WANs, but there is
a growing interest in implementing higher bandwidth IP VPNs.
In The Netherlands, over 50 percent of interviewees said IP VPNs
were the way forward for their corporate communications.
“It appears that WANs are definitely on the wane,” said Peter
Glasbeek, chief executive, ipulsys.
“Our survey revealed that more than half of businesses are not
willing to settle for the insecurities and low bandwidth of
the public internet. Nor are they willing to pay premium prices
for dedicated links that force them to pay by pipe size rather
than bandwidth usage,” he observed.
Glasbeek said businesses are clearly in favor of Web-enabled
global communications and are becoming aware that IP VPNs add
real value.
IDC Research Director Eric Owen believes the future is rosy
for IP VPNs. Transition to the IP VPN era should be relatively
easy, he said, given the abundance of IP already in the enterprise.
“WAN managers who move away from traditional WAN services, based
on private networks or on transport layer services, such as
frame relay, towards IP-based services are offered considerably
more flexibility from both a cost and capacity perspective,” said
Owen.
During 2000, IDC published figures that indicated an acceleration
in the IP VPN market, with revenues growing to US $2.9 billion by
2004 and the number of connections growing to over 3.6 million,
3 million of which are expected to be dial-up.
According to the recent survey, nearly one in four companies now sees
advantages in outsourcing services, partly as a result of the
pace of development and change. IDC and ipulsys believe this factor,
too, will have a positive impact on IP VPN implementation.
Further information is available from www.ipulsys.com.