Orange Business Services is adding application management to its business acceleration services, with the goal of helping businesses optimize the performance of applications running on their networks.

Known as Network Boost, the network-based service is designed to give businesses the ability to prioritize and accelerate applications, with a specific focus on guaranteeing their uptime and monitoring their performance in real time. Jean Critcher, Orange Business Service's solution director for business acceleration, says the service will allow for reporting and visibility for as many as 20 applications. Critcher says that one of the big advantages of the service is that it lets IT departments associate different applications with different user groups and business units and measure how well the applications are performing to meet each unit's individual demand.

"You may have an SAP application that multiple groups are using transversely," she explains. "And it may be that different groups have different requirements for the application's performance. This solution will let you see if the SAP application is performing up to their expectations."

Network Boost comes fully integrated with the Orange IP VPN and can be used to compress data to accelerate application performance, to anticipate network slowdowns through application monitoring, and to prioritize and change application service quality. Network Boost is part of Orange's Business Acceleration service package, which utilizes tools such as Orange's MPLS IP VPN Network, service-level management and application service-level agreements to monitor and manage corporate communications infrastructure.