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.

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.

Click here to download a complimentary copy of the report

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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When talking to end-users I often get questions like: who are the WAN Optimization vendors that should be on our “short list”? And it is nearly impossible to answer this question without asking them 10 or so questions, such as: how many network locations does your company have, how many users per location, what applications are your company running, what IT projects are you looking to support, what are your security and compliance requirements, etc.

If we are talking about an end-user company that has thousands of locations, an average of 30+ users per location and is looking to conduct a data center consolidation, companies like Ipanema Technologies and Silver Peak are very likely to be on their list. If we are talking about a company that has less than 500 employees, has a relatively small IT department and is running bandwidth-intensive, time-sensitive applications and technologies such as video conferencing or VoIP, then vendors like Exinda should be higher on their list then some of the others. This is not to say that the vendors mentioned above are the best solutions for the usage scenarios that I described, it is only to say that these solutions are more effective (from both business and technology perspectives) in certain use cases.