Clarifying the lack of consolidation in the application delivery market

Insightful analysis by consultants Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler, plus links to the latest WAN news headlines

Today we're taking a break from the 'green IT' discussion we began last week to clarify some points we made the recent newsletter "Why consolidation is not happening in the application delivery market". In that, we discussed that in spite of the spate of recent acquisitions we do not see the application delivery market consolidating any time soon. We received a number of e-mails seeking clarification on some of the points we made and we'll use this newsletter to respond.

We got a number of questions around our statement that neither F5, Riverbed nor Citrix are enterprise networking companies. Actually, we should have added Blue Coat to that list. What we meant by that is that some of the application delivery vendors, such as Cisco, Juniper and Foundry, started off by selling switches and routers and later added network and application optimization functionality. So when we say that neither F5, Riverbed, Citrix nor Blue Coat are enterprise networking companies, all we mean is that they do not manufacture switches and routers.

The main thrust of the newsletter was our belief that the primary vendors in the application delivery market entered the market from different vantage points and have different strategic directions going forward. Hence, we think to truly understand the market and the key players, you need to know how the vendors got to where they are today.

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Today we're taking a break from the 'green IT' discussion we began last week to clarify some points we made the recent newsletter "Why consolidation is not happening in the application delivery market". In that, we discussed that in spite of the spate of recent acquisitions we do not see the application delivery market consolidating any time soon. We received a number of e-mails seeking clarification on some of the points we made and we'll use this newsletter to respond.

We got a number of questions around our statement that neither F5, Riverbed nor Citrix are enterprise networking companies. Actually, we should have added Blue Coat to that list. What we meant by that is that some of the application delivery vendors, such as Cisco, Juniper and Foundry, started off by selling switches and routers and later added network and application optimization functionality. So when we say that neither F5, Riverbed, Citrix nor Blue Coat are enterprise networking companies, all we mean is that they do not manufacture switches and routers.

The main thrust of the newsletter was our belief that the primary vendors in the application delivery market entered the market from different vantage points and have different strategic directions going forward. Hence, we think to truly understand the market and the key players, you need to know how the vendors got to where they are today.

However, while that is a reasonable goal, a few readers pointed out the fact that although the newsletter started out by mentioning Blue Coat’s recent acquisition of Packeteer, we didn't position Blue Coat in the same way as we did with other vendors. With that in mind, let us point out that Blue Coat was founded over 10 years ago as CacheFlow. In 2002, the company was renamed Blue Coat and refocused itself on developing appliances to safeguard networks against Web-based threats. A couple of years ago, Blue Coat added WAN optimization and acceleration capabilities and more recently acquired Packeteer. The Packeteer acquisition brought to Blue Coat QoS functionality along with enhanced application visibility.

So, back to our original point, the major players in the application delivery market do have some similarities, but they also have some very significant differences. In the case of Blue Coat, it comes from a security background and we have to believe that  will be a part of its direction moving forward for the foreseeable future.

Read more about lans & wans in Network World's LANs & WANs section.

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