It would be nice to pretend there’s a rationale behind the home improvement projects I take on -- some master plan for bettering our house, one project at a time. But the reality is, most often the projects that get bumped to the top of the list are the ones that require urgent attention.

We’re going to attempt to install a replacement window next week, for example. Why? Because there’s a big crack in the glass, and the existing window frame is just too old to justify replacing the glazing.

While IT departments clearly have more refined methods for prioritizing IT projects and allocating funds, there’s still the squeaky wheel factor: If something important breaks or needs attention, it will be bumped to the top of the to-do list.

Plenty of network optimization projects no doubt were launched in that vein. A congested WAN link or a poorly performing application might have triggered IT executives to look into acceleration options, for example.

When I spoke to Exinda Networks’ CEO Con Nikolouzakis recently, he told me that the need to solve a particular problem is what drives many customer engagements at his company.

“We’re still finding a lot of people want to solve one problem,” he says. “They might be having problems with VoIP, or they're trying to do Lotus Notes replications, or something like that. The market is still at the stage where companies are trying to fix specific problems.”

But there are signs enterprises are looking to take a higher-level view of network optimization. In anticipation, vendors are making the case for enterprise-class features that can enable a large-scale rollout. For example, Blue Coat Systems recently announced a software upgrade aimed at making its family of SG appliances ready for mainstream enterprise deployments.

With the upgrade, the appliances are better able to integrate with existing network infrastructure and operations, says Chris King, director of strategic marketing for Blue Coat.

In the past, because of proprietary traffic-management techniques, WAN optimization products have prevented or restricted the ability of network management and traffic assessment tools to get at certain data, such as that generated by Cisco’s NetFlow protocol. WAN optimization products also have been known to interfere with certain firewall operations and policy-based routing schemes.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.