I met a business acquaintance, an IT executive at a bank, for a cup of coffee the other day to talk about making his enterprise run more efficiently. I could tell he was having a tough morning. He just stared at his cup as he stirred in his fourth packet of sugar.

"I wish I could put some caffeine into our online banking applications," he sighed. "Our ATMs are dragging too."

It was a familiar story: Slow transaction response times, frustrated customers, and an overworked IT staff scrambling to provision new infrastructure and bandwidth to speed up throughput. Across the industry, the number and complexity of Web-based applications are growing. Many companies struggle to optimize these environments as more diverse groups of customers and employees - especially remote and mobile workers - increasingly rely on the Internet to access interactive content, ecommerce and other business applications.

One approach to improve end user response times is to use application acceleration technology. Application acceleration speeds application generation through special controllers that balance traffic, offload server processing and dynamically cache content. It also speeds application delivery over a network by opening simultaneous Web browser connections while compressing the transmitted data and reducing the number of round trips involved. Depending on the configuration, industry experts believe application acceleration can improve the performance of Web applications from two to ten times their current levels.

My banking acquaintance and I agreed that application acceleration could add that jolt of caffeine that would translate to faster response times and greater satisfaction for the bank's online users. This would improve adoption of online banking services, transaction completion rates and overall customer loyalty. What's more, efficiency improvements would mean that less bandwidth and fewer servers would be needed to support new applications and customers.

I cautioned my friend, however, to take a closer look at the kind of application acceleration solution that was best for his bank. Not all options offer the same potential to improve the user experience or to maximize the business benefits.

One solution is the do-it-yourself approach where the bank's IT department would install and manage the acceleration devices and servers in the bank's data center. Another approach would be a fully managed, hosted solution in which the bank would handoff installation and management of this Web infrastructure - including the acceleration capabilities - to a service provider. I offered my friend a word of advice: When opting for the managed solution, make sure he selects a vendor experienced in managing complex Web application environments, and also has the acceleration capabilities integrated into its network. This holistic approach would streamline operations and provide a truly end-to-end solution from the data center out to application users.

Since an overworked IT staff and bandwidth allocation were my friend's biggest hurdles, the fully managed, hosted solution appeared to be the best approach. In addition to delivering the efficiencies he needs - and delivering them quickly - this approach would require minimum setup on his part. The system would be transparent to his customers, and it would be up and running faster than if he were to install the project internally. And with the fully managed, hosted approach, there are no upfront capital costs, specialized staffing, training or tooling for the equipment.

I could see my friend got the message. When he got up to leave, he said would investigate the technology and implementation options more and give me a call if he had any questions.

"Do you mind picking up the check," he said as we shook hands. "I stopped by the ATM before, but the line was too long."

Steve Caniano is vice president, Hosting Services at AT&T. He can be reached at caniano@att.com. More information on application acceleration can be found at www.business.att.com/hosting.