No one can accuse the WAN optimization market of standing still. Vendors continue to jockey for bigger shares of the market, as IT buyers tune in to the advantages of application acceleration and WAN performance-enhancing gear. Today I'm taking the opportunity to catch up on some corporate news in the WAN optimization world, including executive changes, global expansion and vendor consolidation. (Compare Application Acceleration and WAN Traffic Optimization products)

Exinda gets a new CEO

Michael Sharma has taken the helm of Exinda Networks. Sharma replaces former CEO Con Nikolouzakis, who assumed the role of chief product officer and chairman of Exinda’s board earlier this month. Prior to joining Exinda, Sharma was chief operating officer and president at PlateSpin, a virtualization management software company Novell acquired in March for $205 million. Sharma’s experience also includes executive positions at Platform Computing, Netscape Canada, Oracle and Amdahl. “Exinda’s goal is to continue to deliver high quality products that meet the needs of our global customers for improving application delivery,” said new CEO Sharma in a statement. “Exinda will continue to expand its distribution channel to meet the growing worldwide demand for its WAN optimization products.” Exinda also has a new CFO: Efrem Ainsley, former CFO for PlateSpin.

Expand buys NetPriva

Expand Networks announced plans earlier this month to acquire NetPriva, which specializes in software-based WAN optimization products that can monitor and manage traffic flows among remote end users. NetPriva’s client-based technology can control traffic at the PC socket layer and has a distributed QoS mechanism to manage all connected PCs. “As companies deploy advanced technologies such as IP telephony, unified communications and MPLS WANs, more and more traffic flows bypass the data center,” said Joe Skorupa, research vice president at Gartner, in a statement. “In this environment, the ability to implement distributed QoS in this mesh of endpoints will be key.” Expand (which recently secured $8.5 million in venture funding) says the NetPriva technology will play a role in its forthcoming client-based WAN optimization controller software, which is due in the first quarter of 2009.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.