Network traffic jams create opening for small vendors to launch "application acceleration" products

Sensing that giants such as Nortel and Cisco have overlooked a sizeable niche market, a number of vendors are attracting manufacturers' attention with offerings aimed at enterprise application acceleration. What's that, you may ask?

Essentially, it's finding ways of shortening the time it takes for applications to respond to a user's request. Slow response times become a bigger issue as companies expand their IT networks to include multiple Web connections and Web-based applications.

Vendors tend to approach the problem in one of two ways. Some focus their energies on the server, and have developed tools for server load balancing, SSL acceleration, server input-out acceleration, and static server caching. Other vendors focus on the network, offering WAN traffic compression, WAN bandwidth management, and XML acceleration. Whatever the technology behind the solution, the basic aim is simple: reduce application response times, while getting more data through a fixed-size pipe.

According to Thomas Mendel, a principal analyst with Forrester Research, Frankfurt, Germany, WAN traffic compression is probably the tactic gaining most traction with manufacturers. "Manufacturing companies often are leery of bleeding-edge stuff," he says. But corporate WANs—clogged by "Web-ified" legacy applications, VoIP, and bandwidth-hungry enterprise apps—are seen as ripe for compression, he says, and so are proving lucrative hunting grounds for vendors like Packeteer, Peribit, and Expand.

Another company to watch is Redline Networks, which aims to straddle both the server and WAN acceleration markets, capitalizing on the fact that neither enterprise applications nor general-purpose operating systems are designed to handle networking activities in the optimized manner in which, say, for example, Cisco's IOS system works within routers. "IOS won't run Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, but it does a great job of moving packets of data around," says Israel L'Heureux, Redline's CTO.

The IOS example has become something of a poster child for Redline. The company's offering sits between the WAN and the manufacturing or enterprise application, and acts as a transaction broker, handling data handshakes and multiplexing. "The application talks to the Redline box over a fast local connection in the data center, and it's then the job of the Redline box to talk to the users," says L'Heureux. "Handling dropped packets and resending them becomes the responsibility of Redline, not the enterprise application. The application thinks it's talking to a perfect client that looks like only a few local users—not thousands of users worldwide."

Port80 Software tackles network congestion in another way. As the name implies, its httpZip tool compresses text-based MIME data and Javascript "on the fly," boosting transmission rates. Enterprise applications are typically exchanging text-based data, which are ideal for compression, notes Joseph Lima, Port80's COO and director of product development. Combine text-intensive data exchanges with a scenario where there are remote users, or non-Ethernet users taking orders or managing inventory out in the field," he says, "and you've got a classic example of where Port80 can make a difference."

According to Forrester's Mendel, the application acceleration market last year was worth $1.5 billion, with revenues projected to grow to $1.8 billion this year. The key question, he says, is whether an industry giant like Cisco will enter the market.