Employees in many businesses are now mobile. They are required to be out of the office in order to get their jobs done. That means being at the customer site, traveling to partner offices, or even visiting other offices within the company.

For most users, being out of the office generally means that they are significantly less productive. They have limited access to key data and applications, and co-workers generally accept that collaboration will be difficult, particularly if they rely upon a VPN or SSL/HTTPS connection to access data. Traveling workers desperately search for high-quality Internet connections in hotels and in airports in order to communicate with project teams, keep in touch with customers, and keep business moving. For sales teams, traveling executives, and other mobile workers, poor connectivity has simply become a cost of doing business: they have to work longer hours to get the same or less work done than they would in the office.

With a mobile wide-area data services (WDS) solution like Steelhead Mobile, mobile workers can now have the same LAN-like access to applications and data that employees in the office have. These solutions use software running on the end-users' machine to connect with an appliance in the data center.

By creating an optimized connection, users can dramatically reduce the amount of data that they need to send over the WAN, while at the same time streamlining the chatty behavior of transport and application protocols. In the case of Oracle forms and MAPI 2007, these benefits are extended further to the application layer, layer 7, which provides even greater acceleration for Oracle E-Business Suite and Exchange 2007 users. The end result is that applications can run 5, 50, or even up to 100 times faster.

For mobile workers, this means that they can be productive again. They can collaborate with co-workers in real time. Design documents, Excel files, or even large email attachments can be sent at blazing speeds around the world. Being on the road is no longer a barrier to getting their jobs done.