I believe you are mixing 2 different application acceleration technologies, web server load balancing (the Juniper DX product line) and application acceleration (the Juniper WX product line).
Could this be why you assume vendors are diverging?
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More to the point and by
More to the point and by Gartner terms, products dealing with WAN acceleration are categorized as WOC (WAN Optimisation Controller), while load balancers sitting in front of the servers are named ADC (Application Delivery Controller).
The confusion came when layer 4 equipment players started their venture into layer 7 a few years back.