Bojan Simic: Also, as we are getting closer to the end of the year, it would be interesting to look back and see some of the key trends in the Web Performance Management market, especially in the SMB. If you wouldn't mind spending a few minutes summarizing some of the changes that happened in 2010, in terms of level of interest for management solutions in this market segment or different types of requirements, anything that jumps out at you that happened in the last 12 months or so?

Mehdi Daoudi: One of the things that we have noticed, at least on the web performance management side, I think it will be a big thing in 2011. Already in 2010 you have a lot more democratization of web performance monitoring tools, of folks that are more and more interested. I was at a meet up in Los Angeles, where we had 20-30 people that came to hear about web performance, whether it is optimization or monitoring and these are people that 2 or 3 years ago wouldn't be sitting at the table because the company didn't care or didn't have a budget for these types of solutions. I think Web performance is going to play a very important part in 2011. Performance itself is more and more becoming a differentiator. You can go and shop on site XYZ rather than on site ABC, because with site XYZ you will always be able to get in and get out in 3 seconds without having to wait for pages to load and checkouts, etc. Performance monitoring is going to be important. The other thing that we are noticing is that more and more SMB companies are getting out of their boundaries of their comfort zones. They are looking to buy CDN, they are looking to buy load balancing, they are looking to get into web optimization and performance is getting its place as being the fifth P in the marketing mix at this point because it is a differentiator. So companies of full size are starting to realize that and I think that they are going to spend money in 2011, either improving their service through better data center infrastructure, load balancing or just in monitoring in general.

Bill Kish: You asked about what the trends are that we were seeing this year, and it's interesting, the trend that people are talking about is the cloud. Is anybody actually deploying it, not really right now. The cloud is a great development tool. It is where virtualization was about 2 years ago. People are experimenting with it, they are using it for development platforms and it is really a great tool for start ups, but it is not really something that people are talking to us about right now, in terms of what affects them on a day to day basis. The trends that I am seeing, which is very interesting, is the deployment and the vast expansion in the number of mobile devices that are out there accessing our customer's sites. These devices have very specific applications and network traffic patterns, which is somewhat different than desktop devices just because of the networks that they have to traverse. We are starting to work on some technology which is going to provide some interesting boosts to people trying to deliver applications to mobile devices. AJAX technology is another thing which is finally coming into the forefront. AJAX technology requires that a browser requests lots and lots of small objects very frequently as opposed to a few very large objects. It makes for a very rich user experience, but it really changes the patterns by which servers and the applications that are running on them are accessed. So we have been tweaking the way that we handle traffic for AJAX to enhance that. 2010 was a very interesting year and 2011 should be an even more interesting year.

Peter Melerud: I agree with both Bill and Mehdi about the technology aspects of what's happening in 2010-11, but what we have noticed, not just in 2010, but in previous years also, there has been a slow but sure growth and awareness among even the SMBs about the need for having a solution that addresses web optimization, high availability, and the delivery and enhancements that these types of solutions can provide. We are seeing more conversions between the learning curve of the SMBs and about the fact that they need something like this, and also on the enterprise side as well and some of the larger customers who are seeing this technology more pragmatically. They are looking at it from more of a core aspect of load balancing and ADC, what can it do to really improve the traffic flow, the responsiveness to my users. They look at it in terms specific to the applications that they are running and we are glad to see that there is that trend and we will probably see that increase dramatically in 2011 as well.

To listen to the podcast click here

To listen to individual sections of the podcast:

Section 1: Defining the SMB market
Section 2: ROI of Web performance management solutions
Section 3: Key differences between SMB and large enterprises in managing Web performance
Section 4: Key capabilities for SMB
Section 5: The importance of management flexibility
Section 6: Key trends in 2010
Section 7: Overviews of Catchpoint Systems, Coyote Point and KEMP Technologies