Version 3.0 of the South Plainfield, N.J.-based company's Ishared software adds WAN Optimization to speed up TCP/IP, 'which was not designed for a WAN,' said Noah Breslow, vice president of marketing and product management. The software uses three methods to boost transmission speeds: acceleration, reduction and compression.

The software accelerates TCP/IP by buffering data and using local acknowledgements at the branch office. The reduction feature means that if data is sent twice, a 21-byte reference to the original data stream is used the second time instead of the data stream itself, which could be 4K or more.

And while reduction helps save time on second transmissions, data compression is designed to save time initially, Breslow said.

As a result, a document using Microsoft Corp.'s SharePoint collaboration application, which would normally take 94 seconds to transmit, takes just 10 seconds on the first transmission and 7 seconds the second time, Breslow said.

Previous versions of the software provided similar functionality for storage protocols.