In our last newsletter, we discussed a couple of forms of convergence and highlighted the benefits of each form, as well as the associated technical and organizational impediments. Today, we are going to discuss yet another form of convergence that is just beginning to be discussed.

This latest form is the coming together of security and application acceleration. For example, some of the vendors who are advocating this new form of convergence are saying that it provides greater efficiencies. For example, some of these vendors say that it makes sense to only do deep packet inspection once and use that inspection to both provide security and application acceleration functionality.

Using deep packet inspection as the basis for converging security and application acceleration is just one of several approaches that vendors are discussing. However, even though vendors such as Juniper have spent billions of dollars acquiring companies in the security and application acceleration markets, none of these vendors has laid out a compelling framework for how this convergence should occur and the exact benefits that it provides.

The fact that there are competing approaches and no compelling framework means that IT organizations face yet additional technical uncertainties as they grapple with how to expand their initial deployment of application acceleration functionality. We also believe that there will be organizational issues that have to be overcome before this new form of convergence can become pervasive.

Future newsletters will explore the alternative approaches that vendors are taking towards converging security and application acceleration and will discuss the pros and cons of each approach. We will also seek your input as to whether or not there are significant organizational issues that limit this form of convergence. These newsletters will also lay out the timeline for if and when we think the convergence of security and application acceleration becomes mainstream.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.