Most people know what it's like to discover a project is more work than you bargained for. In my own experience, the day I tried to install a replacement window immediately comes to mind. The IT world is full of technologies that can be more complex than buyers imagine, and sometimes it takes a third-party to salvage a deployment.

Managed services provider Virtela, for example, has seen plenty of companies start out planning to deploy and manage their own WAN acceleration gear, only to find the DIY approach isn’t for them. It’s one of the reasons the network and security services provider launched its own managed WAN acceleration service a little more than a year ago.

The evolution of Virtela’s WAN acceleration service followed a different product development cycle than is typical for the company, says Bill Dodds, Virtela’s vice president of sales and marketing.

“A lot of customers bought these appliances themselves, maybe two or three years ago. They were kind of sold as ‘plug it in, set it, forget it.’ But that has turned out not to be the case, you have to manage these things,” Dodds says.

For example, anytime a company adds a site, changes routes on its network, or deploys a new application, the equipment needs to be tuned, he says. “The management piece became a little more time consuming, a little more onerous, so customers started looking for us to take over management of their equipment.”

After getting into the market with customers that had already bought gear, Virtela fleshed out its own soup-to-nuts service whereby it can procure, configure, deploy and manage WAN acceleration gear on an ongoing basis. “We started taking over the management of these boxes, and from that we deployed our traditional portfolio, which is a managed service,” Dodds says.

These days companies interested in Virtela’s WAN acceleration services can chose from among a few different implementation options. Enterprises can still purchase WAN acceleration devices on their own and opt to have Virtela manage them, or customers can take advantage of Virtela’s collocation services and deploy an acceleration device in one of Virtela’s data centers.

“We have data centers deployed globally, so we can locate a customer’s equipment in our POP, or point of presence, as a collocated service. By taking the appliances and locating them in a specific region, a customer can serve three or four of its offices with one appliance,” Dodds says.

Looking ahead, Dodds says Virtela envisions being able to offer WAN acceleration (Compare Application Acceleration and WAN Traffic Optimization products) as a pure service running on a shared platform. Something Virtela deems a high priority, is “to get this capability virtualized into our network, so that you don’t have to buy the box,” he says.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.