Most large enterprises have many custom or in-house applications that have been written over many years. Generally, those applications were written by people in a lab or office connected to servers through the LAN. When the application is rolled out to remote offices that are connected over high-latency, low-bandwidth WAN links, that application that worked so well in the home office can break down completely.

Sometimes the degradation in performance is caused by the lack of bandwidth, sometimes by the way TCP affects the application, and sometimes by the application itself. Depending on the cause of the problem, Steelhead appliances can make a big difference in the performance of the application.

If the primary cause of the slowdown turns out to be either lack of bandwidth or the effects of TCP, then Steelhead appliances can make a significant difference. If however the cause turns out to be the application or the application protocol, then custom tuning or a separate latency module to address the application protocol would be required in order to create a significant increase in performance.