Customers swayed by Peribit's promises

By PETER GRIFFIN

Its promise of reducing traffic across company data networks by up to 90 per cent is likely to have IT managers smirking in disbelief.

But bandwidth optimisation company Peribit is winning an increasing number of customers.

In the space of a few months, California-based Peribit has signed up a number of local customers - Tait Electronics, Air New Zealand, the Bay of Plenty Health Board and the Department of Conservation among them, and a number of other undisclosed deals are in the works, according to Peribit's regional manager, Michael Paul.

The idea is that companies can invest in lower capacity data links but use Peribit's technology to make those links more efficient.

That "sequence reduction" technology comes in the form of hardware devices that are fitted at points on a company's wide area network and managing all of the data passing through those points.

Peribit devices were being used to reduce load on the network linking Air New Zealand's data centres.

Systems integrator Infinity is acting as Peribit's local agent. Paul said companies were increasingly moving to install virtual private networks to shuttle data between sites.

But faster connections did not always give the improved performance IT managers expected with a fatter data pipe.

"If people have issues with their wide area network they go back to the telco, but it's not the telco's business to manage applications," said Paul.

"If you get a 2Mbps VPN link and load it with data, it can drop down to 200kbps because of latency issues."

That's because various types of data crossing WANs were not transported efficiently.

More companies are running corporate applications such as SAP, Oracle, Citrix and voice over internet protocol, and the load on networks is increasing.

Peribit technology grew out of work in the area of bioinfomatics.

"They were trying to speed up research of human DNA. Then someone at Stanford suggested they apply it to networks," said Paul. Peribit's customers include Chevron Texaco and Dow Jones and its key competitors are Packeteer, Cisco, Expand and Internap.