* Vendors jockey for position in app acceleration market
It all started earlier this year when Akamai acquired Speedera, Juniper Networks purchased Peribit Networks and Redline Networks, and then Cisco stepped up and acquired FineGround. Then in June, Citrix followed suit by putting money down for NetScaler.
If you consider that Forrester Research this year estimated the market for application acceleration technologies could reach nearly $2 billion, the vendors’ race to acquire and incorporate application acceleration tools into their product suites makes sense. In the past, the various vendors that made up the application acceleration market provided technologies that each addressed part of the problem. The once disparate application acceleration market has started to consolidate, and a smaller set of vendors provides more capabilities in fewer products.
Server load balancing, traffic management and caching technologies all fall under the umbrella of application acceleration. But with the acquisitions and obvious vendor consolidation, industry analysts predict the market will further consolidate and the technologies will overlap more.
Forrester Research predicts four submarkets will emerge from the larger application acceleration market: data center acceleration, which is an evolution of the server load balancing market; last-mile acceleration, which features technology to accelerate access for users at home and branch offices; IP traffic management, which would entail optimizing application delivery on the WAN; and application-specific acceleration, which could include streaming media applications, file distribution technologies, collaborative applications, and packaged and custom apps.
An industry veteran may take the lead in yet another networking area. “Enterprises will benefit from having one vendor optimizing their end-to-end application flows,” writes Thomas Mendel in the July 13 Forrester Research report “Acquisitions transform app acceleration market.” “If Cisco can beef up its WAN traffic compression capabilities, it has the best shot at leading the market in the long term.”
Incidentally, Cisco last year acquired Actona Technologies for $82 million. Actona pumped up Cisco’s product line with wide area file services technology, which further enhances Cisco’s competitive advantage in the overall WAN optimization market. (I had mentioned Actona in one of last week’s newsletters, but neglected to mention it had been acquired by Cisco.)
