Buy your Riverbed, F5 and Expand shares now!

I've noticed that the point products in the Application Delivery Controller (ADC) market are rapidly being snapped up, typically by vendors who a) do a whole lot more than just accelerating traffic and b) see ADC as just a small, but critical, part of what they do (or, more accurately, should be doing).

As I see it:

1) Applications, file transfer protocols and web traffic are demanding more and more bandwidth.
2) The Internet backbones aren't quite keeping pace just yet, particularly in developing nations.
3) Latency will always be a problem.

For these reasons, WAN acceleration solutions and ADCs are increasing in importance to CTOs. Not necessarily so much as a single project perhaps (although these do still happen of course), but more as a kind of "tick in the box" type request. Enterprise-sized organisations are incorporating these requirements into larger projects and so the main IT vendors that are being expected to provide the solutions for those larger projects feel compelled into having an offering in this space.

The proof is in the pudding:

Juniper buys Peribit in 2005
Cisco buys Fineground in 2005
Citrix buys NetScaler in 2005
Citrix buys Orbital Data in 2006
Blue Coat buys Packeteer in 2008
Brocade buys Foundry Networks in 2008

I don't claim this is an exhaustive list, I'm sure there are others I've forgotten, but all of these acquirers had one thing in common: they all came from different backgrounds but obviously felt the need to back up their core product lines with some sort of WAN acceleration technology.

Which leads us to the tantalising question. Who's next?

By taking a glimpse at the Gartner Magic Quadrant for this area of technology, it doesn't really take a rocket scientist to work out who candidate number 1 might be. Riverbed sticks out like a sore thumb. It concentrates on WAN acceleration and nothing else, it's the market leader by quite some margin and, for the reasons mentioned above, there must be several pairs of lips being well and truly licked at the moment. Talk about primed to be plucked.

Who else? Well, my money's on Expand and F5. Expand is in a similar situation to Riverbed but would be a lot cheaper. F5 have a very sound and complete product portfolio, an exceptionally loyal channel and some very, very good technology indeed. Perhaps VMWare might be a candidate to buy them? VMWare have pots of cash, I don't expect F5 would set them back too ridiculous an amount and it would really annoy Citrix!