Content Summary : Enterprise-class applications, such as those from SAP, have become the cornerstone of most multinational corporation’s (MNCs) software strategies, and are used for processing trillions of business transactions annually. Adopting SAP can provide advantages for an enterprise such as providing a unified business process framework that permits all business units to access information required by individual groups, while allowing upper manage- ment to view the entire operation of the enterprise without having to manually interface with many different sub-systems. However, for all the importance of SAP, all too often insufficient attention is paid to how it performs over a WAN. If pre-deployment and/or upgrade testing is limited to only the campus LAN environment, SAP’s true WAN performance only comes to light as the application begins to be promoted into production and users are being added to a live system. Also, leading up to production rollout, network managers are often provided with very limited requirements (e.g. number of users and “go-live” date) from which they must size the required network. They are also often not made aware of SAP’s interfaces with other applications, which drive application-to-appli- cation or “A2A” transactional traffic. When users complain about disconnects or slow response times, all focus is upon the network. In fact, Gartner, Inc. estimates that more than 80% of application availability and performance problems are being blamed upon the network. Precious time, valuable resources, and scarce IT funding are then spent on trial-and-error quick-fixes (e.g. server upgrades, data base tuning, etc.) until performance is improved.