* Webtorials, Robin Layland offer ‘Application Acceleration Challenge’
Webtorials recently published an on-demand “Application Acceleration Challenge,” produced in cooperation with Robin Layland of Layland Consulting. Robin has been producing these challenges for a number of years in print form, and the recent Webtorials publication moves from the more traditional format to a virtual conference that emulates attending a multi-vendor session at a trade show.
The results of the challenge, and an extensive document, are available here.
The participants in the challenge include Packeteer, Array Networks, Expand Networks, Riverbed, and Juniper.
Layland acted as the “virtual moderator” of the session. According to Robin, for both the on-demand presentations and the paper, the question is not whether you implement application acceleration, but who do you turn to for an application accelerator?
In his words:
“I have gathered the leading application acceleration vendors to let them explain what they can do to help your application go faster. There is no one application acceleration ‘trick’ that accelerates all applications. Each vendor attacks the problem in a slightly different way and specializes in different problems and protocols. That does not mean that there is no overlap – there is – just that each vendor has his own set of strengths.
“The goal is to save you time by bringing the vendors together to answer a common set of questions. I asked each vendor the following questions:
– What type of application acceleration do you provide?
– What makes your solution the best solution?
– What is different about your solution?
“I did not ask the vendors to spend time explaining the importance of application acceleration, so you will not see the normal ‘marketing’ position on the importance of application acceleration. Anyone who has slow applications or complaining users knows the importance of speeding up application delivery. Instead you will see the vendor immediately explain what their strengths and competitive advantages are.”
The Application Acceleration Challenge can be found here: (free registration required)
