Manufacturing companies in industries like consumer goods, aerospace, automotive, defense, technology, machinery, and virtually any company that makes complex products, rely on CAD/CAM and PLM solutions. While extremely powerful, these applications rely on the sharing and transmission of very large files, solid models, simulations, project files and other data that can be hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes in size.

In today's environment, development, design and manufacturing is no longer a local endeavor. Design and manufacturing are likely to be done in sites separated by thousands, or even ten thousand miles. The latency to remote sites at those distances can easily be in the hundreds of milliseconds, and if satellite links are in use, the latency can be close to a full second (750 to 1,000 ms). That extremely high latency, combined with typically low bandwidth and very expensive WAN links, results in terrible throughput.