SLOUGH, UK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Expand Networks, www.expand.com, the leader in optimizing WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualization, today came to the aid of beleaguered IT managers who face the challenge of keeping corporate networks productive during the forthcoming football World Cup finals in South Africa. In a recent survey by Internet Service Provider, Eclipse, 54% of working British staff are planning to watch World Cup matches on their office computers resulting in a surge in network traffic and bandwidth usage that could significantly impact the performance and throughput of critical business application and services.

“Just like world class footballers, corporate networks need to be finely tuned to ensure the highest level of performance and agility,” commented Adam Davison, VP corporate sales and marketing at Expand. “Also, in order to perform at their very peak footballers need two key attributes – vision and control. Likewise IT managers need the same tools to gain insight into network activity and the ability to manage network usage. With Expand IT managers get visibility and control over network usage, assuring priority and quality of service is given to business critical applications and services. In doing so they will be able to support England’s world cup bid without scoring an IT own goal.”

Expand’s Accelerator range of wide area network optimisation solutions include a fully integrated Layer 7 quality of service (QoS) engine. By inspecting data flow on the network the QoS engine can identify the traffic linked to users watching live streams of football and then give IT managers a visual “real time” account on how much bandwidth is being consumed. It then allows them to control this traffic ensuring business critical applications can continue to function.

Furthermore, with Expand’s QoS engine you have the ability to control these streams both inbound and outbound from a single device at the core data center or head office meaning a very small investment and rapid deployment.

“Like most, I’ll be hard at work at my PC during kick-off, but of course I may sneak a peek! Difference is, I know my network has the control and visibility to handle it; confident that my football streaming won’t impact business applications performing in the way they should. While you can’t expect all employees to be model employees, with a bit of optimization technology, at least they won’t drive your IT managers completely insane with bandwidth starvation this world cup!”