The economy may still be in the dumps, but money is flowing into the Web acceleration market. Redline Networks recently announced it completed another round of funding, getting $12 million in the deal. It brings total equity investments in the company to $24.8 million. Charles River Ventures led the new round.

That round of funding closed shortly after Redline announced its latest product: an appliance that accelerates Web applications such as PeopleSoft, Lotus, Siebel and SAP, as well as custom applications. The product, the E/X 3250 Enterprise Web I/O Accelerator, marked Redline's expansion beyond its Web site-focused roots.

Originally, Redline focused on securing and accelerating Web sites. ESPN.com and Gap.com are a couple of its customers. Redline's appliances speed up the performance of Web applications by offloading I/O workloads from origin servers.

With the new appliance, Redline is bringing its expertise into the Web-based application world. It's an area that's getting a lot of attention as businesses put more applications online and look for ways to boost performance without having to invest in additional infrastructure.

Other companies that also focus on speeding and securing Web applications have also gotten funding since the beginning of the year. They include Neoteris, NetScaler and Warp.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.