Three network optimization vendors have unveiled partnerships in recent weeks aimed at extending the breadth and reach of their respective products.

Vendor partnerships can formalize the process of making different products work well together. There’s a sales incentive for the vendors, clearly. But there are also benefits for enterprises; the upfront effort on the part of vendors can reduce some of the chore involved in making products designed for different functions interoperate, for example.

Among the latest round of vendor pairings is that of F5 Networks and Microsoft. F5 plans to use Microsoft’s service management software to bolster its new platform for collecting and analyzing data from F5 devices. An OEM agreement between the two vendors calls for F5 to incorporate Microsoft’s event and performance monitoring software, System Center Operations Manager, into its own new management appliance, called ControlPoint.

For enterprises, the combo promises to provide greater insight into the performance and availability of a company’s F5 devices and the applications running over them. ControlPoint will turn performance data into information enterprises can automatically act on, F5 says. For example, if it detects an application slowdown, ControlPoint can be set to accelerate the application before end users are disrupted.

The second recent pairing is that of Blue Coat Systems and storage vendor Network Appliance. Blue Coat (which last fall acquired NetApp’s NetCache proxy caching business) announced plans to join NetApp’s partner program in an effort to help customers more effectively accelerate disaster recovery and back-up processes over the WAN.

Through the partner program, Blue Coat gains access to NetApp software development kits, technical support, training and other resources; customers benefit by having access to WAN optimization products that are tested to work with NetApp storage. In addition, tight integration between NetApp storage devices and Blue Coat SG appliances will make it easier for enterprise customers to accelerate data transfer, disaster recovery and business continuity processes while maintaining the security and policy controls needed for their end users, the vendors say.

The third alliance unveiled this month hints at an eventual convergence of WAN optimization and core routing technologies. Under terms of a new agreement, Huawei-3Com will be embedding acceleration software from Expand Networks’ Compass platform in its upcoming Intelligent Management Center (iMC) router line.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.