While some vendors say they're gearing up for lean sales (Sun and Cisco among them), Crescendo Networks is telling a different story.

Sales of AppBeat DC, Crescendo’s flagship Web application acceleration product, are going strong and the company has achieved 300% year-over-year business growth since 2005, says Janine Roth, Crescendo’s president. (Compare Application Acceleration and WAN Traffic Optimization products)

Expansion plans are in the works, fueled by a new influx of venture capital. Last week Crescendo completed a $9.5 million round of new funding, bringing its total funding to $36.2 million. The Challenge Fund joined existing investors Evergreen Venture Partners, Apax Partners, Magma Venture Partners, StageOne Ventures and Convergent Capital in this latest funding round.

“Our intention for those funds is really to expand our sales and marketing efforts in the U.S. and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), as well as continue our sales growth in Asia-Pacific,” Roth says.

The company last year established a new North American headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., and doubled the size of its staff there. Its engineering and research and development operations remain in Tel Aviv, Israel, where the company was founded.

Crescendo has had success with AppBeat in industries including Web commerce, media and entertainment, financial services, education and retail. Among its 200 customers are retailer Aéropostale, human resources outsourcer TriNet, social networking site Friendster, Colgate Palmolive, Internet advertising vendor AdEngage and China’s ICBC bank.

On the product front, Crescendo recently enhanced its AppBeat DC product with global server load balancing and 3Gbps compression speeds. Next up are application-specific features designed to further improve Web application delivery. Crescendo is in a controlled release of new features that use application-level details to identify potential performance roadblocks that occur at the business-transaction level, for example, Roth says. “It’s something will be of very high value to Web-based businesses and software-as-a-service vendors,” she says.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.