The market for application acceleration and WAN optimization technologies continues to grow as another vendor enters the market with tools to help enterprise companies accelerate WAN traffic.

Intelligent Compression Technologies, or ICT for short, last week released AcceleNet 3.0 Enterprise, which the company says in a press release will provide customers with acceleration capabilities to remote and branch offices, as well as telecommuters and mobile users. The product uses software installed in the data center and at remote locations or on client machines to enable the compression, optimization and security capabilities.

The company says its software approach can scale better and offer customers more flexibility when it comes to deployment. For instance, in a recent Network World online forum IT managers expressed concern about the cost and maintenance of deploying multiple boxes in an effort to optimize application performance across the WAN. According to an ICT brochure on the AcceleNet product, the software can be installed on a client laptop and enable a secure connection through a VPN back to the data center, or it can be installed on client desktops in branch offices and communicate via the corporate WAN back to the AcceleNet server in the data center.

In this release, ICT included a feature set it calls Grand Slam, which incorporates four distinct capabilities. To start, the Application Accelerators enable high-speed Web applications, file shares and Exchange performance across the WAN. Compression Engines reduce bandwidth utilization, the company says, using format-specific and delta compression techniques. The company also enhanced the software with network optimization capabilities by improving performance over otherwise problematic connections, such as wireless, satellite or WiMAX links. And lastly, ICT's AcceleVPN feature couples security with speed over WAN links.

ICT, which announced the release of AcceleNet 3.0 Enterprise last week at a Gartner conference, was also recently named by the research firm as a "cool vendor."

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.