Aberdeen Report Reveals Best-In-Class Enterprises Prefer Managed Services For Optimizing Application Performance

Managed WAN Optimization Solves Challenges of Business-Critical Data Delivery

DENVER, September 15, 2008 - Virtela, the global network solutions company, today announced the availability of a new research report on application performance management by the Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE: HHS). The study, entitled "Optimizing Application Delivery over the WAN," reveals that Best-in-Class organizations are leveraging WAN optimization solutions to improve the delivery of business-critical applications and increasing these investments at a significantly higher rate than their overall IT spend. According to the report, Best-in-Class organizations are also 56% more likely to use managed WAN optimization services rather than do-it-yourself solutions.

The study, which surveyed 170 organizations between July and August of 2008, reports that Best-in-Class companies using WAN optimization and application delivery solutions saw a 79% improvement in bandwidth utilization, achieved more than a 12X improvement in application response times, and decreased WAN latency by an average of 38%. Further, Best-in-Class organizations are investing, on average, 38% of their WAN optimization budgets in managed services, as compared to 13% for all other organizations.

"With new technologies like business video and online collaboration applications increasing the stress on individual networks, companies need clear best practices for making sure their networks will perform at the highest levels possible," said Bojan Simic, Aberdeen research analyst. "Our findings show that WAN optimization is most effective for meeting organizations' bandwidth and application delivery needs, and that deploying WAN optimization as a managed service can have even greater benefits, especially when it comes to consistent network monitoring and cost savings."

"Aberdeen's latest research underscores the importance of best-in-class application delivery as organizations continue to expand globally and need to improve remote employee support to meet strategic business goals," said Virtela CEO Steve King. "Virtela is taking one of the best strategies for improved application delivery - WAN optimization - and offering it as a managed service so that organizations of all sizes can achieve the highest levels of performance without having to worry about infrastructure costs, ongoing monitoring or management of this rapidly evolving technology."

Sponsored in part by Virtela, the Aberdeen report found that while laggard organizations try to solve bandwidth and latency challenges by investing more in bandwidth capacity, Best-in-Class organizations invest in WAN optimization and application delivery solutions to better result. The report shows that organizations using WAN optimization services are 58% more likely to reduce WAN traffic and 78% more likely to improve their ability to estimate needs for bandwidth upgrades as compared to industry average and laggard organizations. The key drivers for these WAN optimization investments are centralization of business-critical data and applications, the need to optimize employee productivity and the need to decrease cost of data communications.

To optimize application delivery for its customers, Virtela offers its Accelerated WAN Service, the industry's first global managed WAN optimization service. This service enables companies to overcome distance limitations and improve application and protocol performance over the WAN by a factor of two to three times on average, or as much as a factor of 30 times, depending on the application. With this service, employees in remote offices, which often experience latencies of 200ms or more, benefit from the same level of application performance as their colleagues at headquarters. In short, the service allows Virtela to deploy the fastest network of its kind and address the applications needs of best-in-class organizations head on.

For a complimentary copy of this report, please visit: http://www.virtela.com/whitepaper_details.aspx?ID=29.

About Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company

Aberdeen isa leading provider of fact-based research and market intelligence that delivers demonstrable results. Having benchmarked more than 30,000 companies in the past two years, Aberdeen is uniquely positioned to educate users to action: driving market awareness, creating demand, enabling sales, and delivering meaningful return-on-investment analysis. As the trusted advisor to the global technology markets, corporations turn to AberdeenTMfor insights that drive decisions.

As a Harte-Hanks Company, Aberdeen plays a key role of putting content in context for the global direct and targeted marketing company. Aberdeen's analytical and independent view of the "customer optimization" process of Harte-Hanks (Information - Opportunity - Insight - Engagement - Interaction) extends the client value and accentuates the strategic role Harte-Hanks brings to the market. For additional information, visit Aberdeen http://www.aberdeen.com or call (617) 723-7890, or to learn more about Harte-Hanks, call (800) 456-9748 or go to http://www.harte-hanks.com.

About Virtela

Virtela, the world's largest independent managed services company, offers award-winning managed services including MPLS and IP-based Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), Security, Remote Access, and WAN/LAN Device Monitoring and Management, to some of the most competitive multinational companies in the world. Offering services in 190 countries, Virtela integrates and manages best-of-breed service providers through partnerships with 500+ carriers, to address the unique needs of its customers. Virtela is headquartered in Denver, Colorado, with Global Network Operations Centers in Denver, Mumbai, India and Manila, Philippines. For more information, please call +1 (720) 475-4000 or visit www.virtela.net.

Media Contact:
Jane Morrissey
Virtela
720.475.4012 (office)
303.808.7671 (mobile)
jmorrissey@virtela.com

Susan Wise
Greenough Communications
(650) 646-3268 x11
swise@greenoughcom.com