Cisco touts application acceleration

New services aim to improve the performance of networked applications

Signalling a further emphasis on the intelligent delivery of information, rather than handling plain data packets, Cisco has declared its Application Networking Services an 'advanced technology'. The networking vendor has also set up a new business unit to support the products.

The services aim to improve the performance of networked applications that reside inside a corporate network or are delivered from a central office to a remote location.

"Many applications have been designed with a broadband network in mind. But there is limited bandwidth in branches," Cisco chief development officer Charlie Giancarlo said in a presentation at the company's annual World Wide Analyst Conference in Santa Clara, California.

The new business unit will offer acceleration engines, caching engines and diagnostic tools to improve network performance. This will allow enterprises to deal with latency issues, and to better utilise bandwidth. Cisco claims to be able to cut network latency by an average of 80 to 90 per cent.

The market for network acceleration tools reached about $1bn last year, according to data from analyst firm Gartner, and is expected to grow to $1.5bn this year. 

But Cisco is late to the party, according to Joe Skorupa, research director for enterprise network infrastructure at Gartner, and is trailing behind competitors including F5 and Netscaler.

"The rise of this market segment is an existing trend, and I'm surprised to see Cisco brand it as one of its 'advanced technologies'," Skorupa told vnunet.com. 

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The growth in the segment is sparked by regulations including Basel II, HIPAA and Sarbanes Oxley, forcing enterprises to better ensure the integrity of their data and IT.

As a result many firms centralise applications and data that were previously spread out over branch offices. But without application acceleration such services will not always work at acceptable speeds, Skorupa argued.

Centralisation also allows firms to consolidate the number of servers that they own and maintain.

The new Application Networking Services business unit will set out to become a dominant party in the application acceleration market, as is the case with all businesses that Cisco brands as 'advanced technologies'.

Such technologies in Cisco's lingo have the potential to grow into a $1bn market for the company, in which it can be the number one or two player with at least 40 per cent market share.

The networking firm promised earlier this year to unveil four new 'advanced technologies' in the current fiscal year ending 30 July 2006.

The first two are the Linksys One bundled network appliance for small businesses, and internet TV and set-top boxes. Others include security, VoIP and home networking.

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