Market Dynamics

Although all IT departments today recognize that application and communication delivery is essential, most organizations struggle to ensure acceptable performance. Unfortunately, the complexity associated with application and communication delivery will continue to increase dramatically over the next few years. Businesses and service providers continue to face all the traditional challenges in WAN management ― mergers and acquisitions, decentralization of employees, on-demand access to enterprise resources by customers, partners or suppliers. And now new challenges have emerged. IT departments must integrate the development of new applications architectures in their network management strategy. This includes the integration of SOA, Web2.0, the virtualization of servers, applications and desktops the implementation of SaaS technology through the Internet and new forms of IP communications (e.g., VoIP, video or even a unified communications deployment).

Well managed application and communication delivery over the WAN is a prerequisite for business excellence. As stated by leading industry analysts, the three main pillars of application delivery management are:

• Visibility: real-time monitoring, long-term reporting
• Control: bandwidth management, QoS, traffic shaping, traffic blocking
• Acceleration: end-to-end protocol optimization, compression, caching