Research firm delves into traffic management

APM Advisors took it upon itself last year to begin dissecting every aspect of application performance management.

The research firm is delving into the nine separate IT disciplines it considers are contributing to the overall goal of application performance management. Last month, it looked deeper into application front ends and this month APM Advisors focuses its attention on traffic management.

Of a market that’s currently led by Packeteer, APM Advisors says traffic management cannot be considered appropriately without also looking at offerings from Allot Communications, Expand Networks and Peribit. While there are other companies, the research firm narrows its studies on these four. And the firm looked at traffic control and optimization, transport and route optimization, and traffic filtering.

Basing all of its assumptions on competition for Packeteer, APM Advisors concludes that Allot represents the only ‘pure-play’ competition, and demonstrates stronger growth, breadth and depth in their product execution to date.

“Allot has a Web filtering product and a cache director platform that enhances” its offerings, the report states. Also, the company can now offer the WAN platforms it obtained from its acquisition of NetReality.

Expand started with the foundation of being a niche product vendor, APM Advisors states, but the company has also demonstrated its understanding of the marketplace and consolidation issues. From the perspective of expanding bandwidth, “Expand is clearing developing a position and associated strategy that will move the company from niche to strategic,” the report states.

Also, APM Advisors says that Expand is focusing more on the branch and remote networking issues that will further the value of the products in large, distributed networks.

Peribit, on the other hand, has a “strong understanding of the application environment [that its] products support” and is developing its technology and business plan to support those application drivers. This focus will give Peribit an advantage in large distributed application environments, the report states, and could eventually make the company and its products a critical component to evolving application networks.

For more on traffic management and the vendors offering products, go to APM Advisors Web site at http://www.apmadvisors.com