Verizon Business announced Tuesday it has expanded its managed WAN services to help companies enhance their bandwidth usage and improve performance of applications.

Many business-critical applications were designed for local area networks, Verizon said, but as more companies expand globally and consolidate data centers, this leads to longer pathways and higher latency. Additionally, bandwidth for nonbusiness use -- like YouTube -- continues to grow, and all of this can drag down business-critical applications like e-mail, instant messaging, and file transfers.

Verizon's Managed WAN Optimization Services will enable companies to fine-tune their IP networks to better manage their applications and reduce latency, the company said.

"Application performance is one of the most critical issues affecting chief information officers today," said Nancy Gofus, senior VP for Verizon Business, in a statement. "With these new application performance and management capabilities, we are helping global enterprise maintain their networks and applications more efficiently and cost-effectively."

The service is already available on Juniper Networks offerings, and Verizon is including Cisco platforms as well. Verizon said it chose to support these platforms because both are highly scalable and work well for geographically dispersed organizations.

"Verizon Business' multivendor approach to managed WAN optimization is a key service differentiator that enables customers to choose the platform that best suits their specific network and application requirements," said Melanie Posey, research director at IDC, in a statement.

Verizon said it assesses, inventories, and manages customers' network infrastructure and applications to determine network health on a daily basis. The company's WAN services are available now, and the company will offer three levels of management.