Apps acceleration market in flux

A run on acquisitions of WAN/LAN acceleration vendors is causing confusion for those exploring the technology, which promises to speed key corporate applications, experts say.

But those with such gear already up and running have few complaints.

Just as this market's picture was becoming clearer, Juniper, Cisco and Citrix shook the Etch-A-Sketch. Juniper bought emerging application acceleration vendors RedLine and Peribit in April for a combined $469 million, while Cisco bought WAN traffic accelerator FineGround for $70 million. And in a move counter to the norm in the networking market, software vendor Citrix, which sells terminal server/thin-client hosting software, bought out NetScaler , a high-end Layer 4-7/application acceleration box maker, for $300 million.

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A run on acquisitions of WAN/LAN acceleration vendors is causing confusion for those exploring the technology, which promises to speed key corporate applications, experts say.

But those with such gear already up and running have few complaints.

Just as this market's picture was becoming clearer, Juniper, Cisco and Citrix shook the Etch-A-Sketch. Juniper bought emerging application acceleration vendors RedLine and Peribit in April for a combined $469 million, while Cisco bought WAN traffic accelerator FineGround for $70 million. And in a move counter to the norm in the networking market, software vendor Citrix, which sells terminal server/thin-client hosting software, bought out NetScaler , a high-end Layer 4-7/application acceleration box maker, for $300 million.

When tallied up, the buyouts equal 86% of the 2004 application acceleration market.

Ties between hardware and software vendors also tightened more recently, as F5 last week announced a deal where Oracle will provide full support for customers accelerating Oracle databases on F5 gear. Additionally, Cisco launched an entirely new business unit around speeding up corporate apps through hardware - Application Oriented Networking - and partnered with IBM, SAP, Tibco and other software vendors in the effort.

One of the challenges of the application acceleration vendors has been defining exactly what their products plug into and what they do. Some, such as NetScaler and RedLine, offer devices that sit in front of banks of servers and provide multiple services, such as Layer 4-7 switching and load balancing, HTTP and non-Web-based traffic compression, as well as SSL VPN services and TCP/IP connection termination. Other gear, such as Peribit and FineGround devices, sit on both ends of a WAN link and optimize traffic for remote sites connected to a corporate data center - providing compression and security features.

According to Gartner, the market for these products came into its own last year when it reached $967 million worldwide. Acceleration gear, which sits only in a data center, accounted for more than half that amount, while WAN optimization products, which are deployed in both the data center and remote locations, made up the balance.

As customers install more of these products, and large networking vendors integrate the services into current gear, the various functions these devices provide - TCP/IP connection management, SSL offload, caching and compression - will be consolidated, experts say.

"Over time [these] functions will converge onto a single platform," says Joe Skorupa, principal analyst at Gartner. "The trend toward platforms that deliver four or more functions will accelerate as customers strive to simplify their infrastructure."

In the meantime, the spate of acquisitions in the market is causing confusion among potential buyers of application acceleration technology, some say. This could make it hard for vendors, especially some of the more established independent vendors still remaining, such as F5, Radware and Packeteer, to sell this technology.