Juniper Back in Web Acceleration Game - Page 2

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Competition in WAN acceleration

Juniper's position in the WAN acceleration marketplace has come under increasing competition in 2008. A partnership between Akamai and Citrix aims to jointly provide hardware and network components to end users.

Juniper already has a business partnership with Verizon Business, which pairs Juniper WXC appliances with Verizon's network.

"Akamai's approach to delivering services is slightly different than a Verizon, AT&T or Deutche Telekom, so they're not direct competition," Richards said. "I don't think there will be an initial impact -- moving forward there may be an impact."

And with WAN acceleration vendor Blue Coat acquiring industry pioneer Packeteer, Juniper faces additional competition. Blue Coast executives say Packeteer provides enhanced application visibility.

"Application visibility is key but not necessarily critical," Richards argued. "Generally we feel it's a key issue but not necessarily critical to the functioning of the WAN acceleration space."

That's not to say that Juniper doesn't have application visibility efforts of its own. Richards noted that Juniper is continuing to enhance its central management system to provide more information on application performance.

"There are a number of application classification capabilities through Juniper's other products as well," Richards said.

Blue Coat's Bethany Mayer, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, took issue with Juniper's view of application visibility.

"This product release focuses on an old view of the WAN optimization market, which is to accelerate everything across the WAN," Mayer told InternetNews.com. "The customer and market requirements have changed over the last year," she continued. "Customers are looking for solutions that enable them to gain visibility into what is going across the WAN and then to be selective in what gets accelerated. "

Juniper used to have another product portfolio of acceleration appliances: the DX series of application-acceleration devices. In January 2008, Juniper discontinued the product. Richards noted that DX customers are still sticking with that platform as opposed to migrating to the WX product lineup.

Supporting customers

Juniper has pledged to continue to support existing customers, though no new DX products will be released.

"Many DX customers have stuck with it [DX] rather than move to WX," Richards added. "The few that have moved, really moved to have both solutions in place because they saw the extra value with WX, but in reality they could not replace or remove the DX because its key value is in the server offload processing side."

Richards argued that the key value to users of the DX was not as an application acceleration solution, per say, but rather as a server offload load-balancing solution.

Although the market for WAN acceleration is growing, Richards noted that key challenges to continued growth revolve around scalability and manageability of acceleration solutions.

"Although there is a lot of interest in this market, the reality is that the deployment is significantly less than the market interest," Richards said.