Shift has moved to acceleration and shaping
With the steady decrease in bandwidth costs and the rise of real-time communications, the emphasis in WAN optimization has shifted from compression and caching of traffic to acceleration and shaping. Real-time protocols are more sensitive to the performance of the network than hungry for raw bandwidth; they hate packet loss and retransmits, they hate variability in latency (and latency, frankly). WAN optimization devices that make the network behave better, rather than mainly compressing traffic, are of enormous help in guaranteeing the performance of UC applications across WAN links.
