For Crescendo Networks, Christmas may have come a bit early last month.

The company in December announced it had garnered some $10 million in venture capital backing to expand upon its application acceleration technology. And considering the crowded market for application acceleration dollars, the start-up company might need all the help it can get.

Crescendo, which packages its Maestro technology on application front-end (AFE) appliances, received this round of funding from Evergreen Venture Partners, as well as existing investors Apax, StageOne, Magnum and Convergent Venture Capital Fund. Crescendo's technology employs an asymmetrical model - meaning customers need only to deploy an appliance in their data center, and competes with the likes of F5 Networks, Cisco and Citrix, with its NetScaler technology.

Crescendo's Application Layer Processing (ALP) technology -- combined with the company's TCP optimization, SSL acceleration and compression features -- can help reduce the processing time for applications on back-end systems such as databases, the company says. And several customers in the past year have embraced to technology that boosts speed and optimized performance, including Colgate-Palmolive. But that may not be enough to get ahead of market leaders and industry heavyweights, says Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president of enterprise research at Yankee Group.

"It's an increasingly crowded market, and in my opinion, Crescendo talks too much about performance," Kerravala says. "The long-term winners in the AFE space are the ones that can bring specific application relevancy to their products. The market for anything application optimization is very strong right now, but with F5 being the brand leader and with Cisco and Citrix making some headway, it gets much harder for a little company like Crescendo to compete."

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.