Partners: Citrix Systems and Akamai Technologies

Technology: The vendors are working to tighten integration between Citrix's NetScaler appliances (hardware devices deployed in the data center to speed Web application delivery) and Akamai's Web Application Accelerator service (a managed service that accelerates Web application traffic over the Internet).

Significance: The vendors' goal is to help joint customers optimize Web application delivery from the data center to the network edge and in the Internet cloud. Citrix's NetScaler devices handle acceleration in the data center, and Akamai's protocol optimizations work to eliminate performance bottlenecks outside the data center. (Compare Application Acceleration and WAN Traffic Optimization products.)

Announcement date: May 2008

Partners: Riverbed Technology and Infoblox

Technology: Riverbed's Steelhead appliances can host network services including DNS, DHCP and IP address-management services from Infoblox.

Significance: By bundling such branch-office services as DNS, DHCP and IP address management on a single WAN acceleration device, customers can cut back on the number of hardware appliances they have to procure and maintain at remote offices.

Announcement date: April 2008

Partners: Silver Peak Systems and EMC

Technology: EMC is reselling Silver Peak's NX series of WAN acceleration appliances, which are designed to speed throughput on high-capacity WAN links.

Significance: Customers gain access to an integrated storage and WAN acceleration platform that has been tested and optimized by EMC. Silver Peak's NX appliances are geared for such applications as backup, replication and disaster recovery among data centers, so the tie-in with EMC is a natural.

Announcement date: February 2008

Partners: Cisco and NetQoS

Technology: Cisco embedded the performance-management vendor's monitoring and reporting technology in its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) gear. The NetQoS software on the gear gathers data about traffic on all the links of WAN connections: from client to WAAS device, among WAAS devices, and among WAAS devices and servers. This data is transferred to and analyzed by the NetQoS Super Agent tool.

Significance: Enterprise customers gain more-detailed reports about how well user-transaction times improve using WAAS, application by application. They can use the reports to determine the network impact of deploying new applications.