Over the last two years, technology vendors have been moving away from using the term "network monitoring" and replacing it with "application performance management." The main reason is that the performance of corporate networks is increasingly measured by the performance of the applications delivered over those networks. As a result, businesses are replacing familiar network-specific metrics, such as network uptime and time to troubleshoot network performance issues, with metrics like application availability and quality of experience as key performance indicators on their networks.

These changes are forcing vendors to enhance their product portfolios and provide more capabilities for monitoring the performance of networked applications in terms of measuring how fast information is delivered to end users via the network, the application itself or the Web services infrastructure, and pointing to possible problems. New opportunities are also being created in the emerging applications performance management (APM) market, including providing it as a managed service, although only a few telecom service providers have focused in on the trend so far.

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TRAC's survey research shows that the top goals for end-user organizations when deploying solutions for WAN optimization are to improve the speed of applications over the WAN and increase network throughput. However, the survey also shows that the top challenges for managing the delivery of applications to end-users are caused by lack of visibility and control over the network traffic. In order to deal with challenges of ensuring seamless delivery of business critical applications over the WAN, organizations need to ensure that they are deploying management solutions that include strong capabilities across three key areas: acceleration, visibility, and control.

This report from TRAC Research examines capabilities that organizations are putting in place to ensure that applications are delivered over the WAN at optimal levels of end-user experience.

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One of the most significant changes in this market, however, is the emergence of new delivery methods for providing these WAN optimization capabilities to end-users. WAN optimization.

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2010 could be a very eventful year in the IT performance management market. It is already becoming apparent that virtualization technologies are moving from lab environments to production, and end-user organization are gaining a better understanding of what cloud computing really means for them and how it should be managed. Also, performance monitoring concepts such as “aligning IT with business”, “end-to-end management of application performance” and “making performance data more actionable” are no longer marketing terms. End-users are now able to translate each of these terms into a set of specific technology capabilities, those that are really needed to achieve their IT management goals. These trends are putting additional pressure on leading IT management vendors to expand their product portfolios and differentiate from the competition.

Even though the majority of large IT management vendors have similar visions of where this market is headed, it is becoming apparent to most of them that they cannot execute these visions by solely depending on their marketing, sales and product development muscles. Their competitors are already getting ahead by acquiring vendors that are leaders in their markets (i.e. Compuware acquiring Gomez, CA acquiring NetQoS, etc.) and many of them will have to act quickly before someone else grabs those few leaders or truly innovative solutions in the various IT performance management sub-markets that are left.

This three-part article series will cover our predictions about the 10 technology companies that are likely to be acquired in 2010. In the first part, we’ll start with two technology vendors, both of which are providing different flavors of application acceleration and traffic management.

New applications, IT initiatives and end-user requests for improving the effectiveness of managing enterprise infrastructure are changing the role that WAN optimization solutions play in the enterprise. Benefits that end-user organizations are looking to achieve from deploying various WAN optimization and accelerating technologies go beyond just mitigating bandwidth upgrades and improving network throughput. WAN optimization solutions are becoming one of the key enablers of top IT initiatives. IT projects such as data center consolidation and desktop and server virtualization improve the flexibility of managing computing resources; but, at the same time, they are moving computing resources further away from the end user, which increases the amount and complexity of data that is being transferred over the WAN.

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