On October 22, Riverbed acquired CACE Technologies, a network monitoring vendor. CACE provides solutions for network traffic capture and analysis and it is also a sponsor of Wireshark project, an open-source network monitoring tool that is being deployed by millions of end-users. CACE's products will become a part of Riverbed's Cascade business unit and Riverbed stated that Wireshark will remain a free tool.

This acquisition can impact Riverbed's market position in three key areas.

1) WAN Optimization

Riverbed has been experiencing a lot of success in the WAN optimization market and many of their competitors find it difficult to compete with data reduction and the acceleration capabilities of Riverbed's Steelhead technology. Even though WAN acceleration techniques alone are enabling organizations to improve application performance over the WAN, due to complexity of WAN traffic, organizations are increasingly looking for WAN optimization solutions that couple acceleration techniques with capabilities for visibility into WAN performance.

Riverbed responded to this trend by acquiring a network visibility vendor, Mazu Networks, in January of 2009. Even though the Mazu acquisition allowed Riverbed to add advanced network monitoring capabilities to its portfolio, it didn't significantly impact Riverbed's position in the WAN optimization market, as Mazu products were provided as a separate product offering from Riverbed's WAN optimization gear through the Cascade business unit. Riverbed did take several steps to tighten integration with Cascade solutions, but it hasn't provided both acceleration and visibility capabilities on a single platform, which is the approach that vendors, such as Exinda, Expand Networks, Ipanema Technologies and Silver Peak, have being using to create competitive advantages.

The acquisition allows Riverbed to enhance visibility capabilities of their WAN optimization solution by integrating CACE Pilot with their Steelhead appliances. CACE Pilot is a solution for analyzing network performance and using it to process data that is being collected by Steelhead appliances will enable Riverbed to provide WAN acceleration and visibility capabilities through the same platform.

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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When WAN optimization technologies were first introduced to the market, solution providers were looking to differentiate from each other mostly based on how fast they could move the data across the WAN and how much they could save for end-users in cost of bandwidth. However, as the complexity of network traffic increased, technology vendors had to provide more than just pure acceleration, data reduction, or basic bandwidth management capabilities. As a result, the ability to fully manage performance of applications delivered over the WAN is now becoming the key point of differentiation among vendors.

This Solution Overview report from TRAC Research examines technology capabilities and strategies of Ipanema Technologies and their alignment with key trends in the WAN optimization market.

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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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Network performance monitoring solutions are not one of those “cool” technologies that get a lot of coverage in the media and these products are sometimes perceived as using an old approach to solve new problems. It’s all about capturing and analyzing packet flow data, right? Well, not really. Not many people realize how much this market has changed over the last 3-4 years.

TRAC Research will cover trends and key vendors in this market in several upcoming reports, but here is a high level overview of 4 key trends that drove some major changes in this market.

It is About Applications on the Network, Not the Network Itself

Back in 2006, I conducted a number of interviews with folks that were in charge of network performance.  The top metric that they were using in that time to evaluate how their networks were doing was unplanned network downtime. I did a similar round of interviews in late 2007 and unplanned network down time wasn’t even one of the top three KPIs that they were using to evaluate network performance (even though it was still extremely important for them). Between these two rounds of interviews, metrics, such as application response times and application availability, became the top indicators of the health of enterprise networks. These changes in end-user needs had a major impact on network monitoring vendors. They caused several major acquisitions, a lot of significant product upgrades, new vendors entering this market, significant changes in messaging and positioning and opened several new markets for vendors that were able to adjust to these changes.

Over the last 2-3 years, the term “Application Performance Management” (APM) became an integral part of marketing messaging for more than 70 technology vendors. Even though solutions provided by all of these vendors are helping to improve the speed and availability of business-critical applications, these vendors are providing solutions that are significantly different. These solutions could range anywhere from network performance monitoring to application acceleration, Web management and even managed/carrier services.

However, the APM as a general concept has become relatively easy for decision makers of end-user organizations to digest, as it hits all key pain points that IT organizations are dealing with. As a result, multiple vendors were more than happy to jump on this bandwagon and position themselves as players in this space.

Other than the language in their press releases and marketing collateral, these vendors really have nothing else in common. Technology wise, how similar are the offerings of F5, NetQoS, Keynote Systems and OpTier? They are not similar at all.