The fairly mature WAN optimization market, which has evolved to offer predictable, but not very explosive growth, as well as a stable set of top competitors, is suddenly new again. And what’s shaken things up in that steady growth market, which serves for the most part large enterprises that have multiple remote locations and data centers with centralized file, messaging and application servers, is the move to cloud computing. That move breaks the symmetric deployment architecture of most WAN optimization overlay networks, which require appliances at both ends of the connection that work together to improve performance, either between multiple data centers or between the data center and the branch office (or individual road warriors using a laptop-based agent connected to a data center WOC).

As enterprises move applications to the cloud, they no longer have the option of installing WAN optimization appliances in the service provider’s data center. While a few startups such as Aryaka and Virtela have begun to address that shift with hosted, asymmetric WAN acceleration services, the two 800 pound gorillas in the WAN optimization and content delivery networking markets legitimized the fledgling asymmetric market with an announced partnership to combine their respective technologies to provide similar services. At the same time, rival Blue Coat announced its own one-armed capability along with other software enhancements and a new high end MACH 5 appliance for data centers. The fact that both announcements took place at spring Interop underscores the renewed competition in the market and gathering strength of the trend.

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