It’s been quite a busy year in the world of satellite optimization, as evidenced by an expert in the space, Expand Networks (News - Alert), which experienced several product enhancements, made appearances at major trade shows, and formed an array of strategic partnerships throughout 2011.

To shed some light on the year, here’s a rundown of the company’s notable accomplishments over the last 12 months:

Expand Networks kicked off 2011 with a bang when lab tests confirmed that its accelerator appliances running the COMPASS Accelerator Operating System consistently and reliably sent more data, compared with competing products, across high-latency, low-bandwidth satellite communications. The tests evaluated the accelerators for fast performance, support for all protocols — including streaming video, VoIP, routing table updates, and music-sharing protocols — ease of use, scalability, good documentation, and ease of installation.

A few months later, the company brought out its charitable side when it supplied its WAN and satellite optimization techniques to help boost the network, connectivity and application performance for Oxfam Australia, a long-time humanitarian charity dedicated to providing impoverished individuals around the world with the skills and resources necessary to achieve stability.

In order to tackle the charity’s performance obstacles, which included poor connectivity and productivity due to limited bandwidth provisions and slow delivery of applications, Expand Networks lent its Expand Accelerators to help Oxfam achieve maximum efficiency out of available bandwidth. Back in June, when Expand Networks and Oxfam solidified this partnership, it was apparent the project was off to a strong start.

“Although we’re only at stage one of the Expand project, we have already experienced positive improvements around providing remote support and the responsiveness of RDP sessions,” said a member of Oxfam’s IT team. “We also have far better visibility into the traffic being utilized over the WAN links. With this information available, we will now be able to start fine-tuning QoS policies to provide improved prioritization of traffic.”

Throughout the latter part of the year, Expand Networks delivered its expertise and services to a variety of organizations, including a county sheriff’s department, brand management company INTERSPORT, satellite communications services provider Vizada, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the oldest and largest centers in the world dedicated to global science research.

Perhaps the most noteworthy partnership that occurred for the satellite optimization company was one with retail giant SPAR Group. After supplying rapid and resilient communications across the retail company’s supply chain for ensuring high-quality services were delivered to convenience store customers, Expand Networks, along with outsource partner Telkom, went on to garner for the second consecutive year a prestigious award from Global Telecoms Business. According to Expand Networks, the collaboration on the SPAR venture beat out hundreds of nominations for the industry’s most innovative projects.

Heading into the holiday season, Expand Networks kept busy by attending SATCON – the fall’s premier conference highlighting satellite communications and content delivery – and the OpenRoom Events’ First Retail Technology Forum, where major retail leaders gathered in Cape Town, the hub of South Africa retail, to engage and potentially kick-start new business initiatives with satellite optimization leaders like Expand Networks. Finally, in November, the company exhibited its military communications optimization techniques at TechNet Asia-Pacific 2011.

If you thought Expand would be tired after its global “tour,” you guessed wrong, as the company most recently released its Mobile Accelerator Client (MACC) Suite, a product designed to make consolidation, collaboration and mobility operate in tandem for boosted business efficiency, and improved performance of business and real-time meshed applications.

The MACC Suite is distinguished by its Heterogeneous Intelligent Virtual Environment (HIVE) technology. To put it simply: With many different types of users accessing different WAN connectivity from an array of locations (heterogeneous), users gain adaptive application visibility and QoS (intelligent) through the use of one distributed “virtual cache” (virtual) that easily adapts to the users’ environments using Intelligent Location Detection, whether the worker is at home, on the move, or within an office (environment).

Coming off such an impressive year, we can only expect 2012 will be just as packed with more exciting news and developments from the satellite optimization leader.

Tammy Wolf is a TMCnet web editor. She covers a wide range of topics, including IP communications and information technology. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Carrie Schmelkin