The market both FineGround and RedLine were in was web or application acceleration, one part of the overall traffic shaping space that also comprises technologies such as WAN optimization and wide-area file services (WAFS).
Generically, all three are trying to achieve more efficient use of bandwidth, overcoming constraints by sending over only what’s changed and avoiding repetition, compressing and, in WAFS’s case, stripping out TCP/IP handshake overhead.
The differences between the three are where and on what they operate: WAN optimization is at Layer 4, operating primarily on TCP itself, whereas app acceleration is up at Layer 7 handling protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, and WAFS is more for storage applications, enabling centralized storage and backup over a WAN while serving files to users in branch offices at near-LAN speeds, that is, not as fast as on the LAN but faster than on a WAN without acceleration. As such it deals primarily with CIFS (in the Microsoft world) and NFS (in Unix).
San Jose, California-based Cisco is already in WAFS as a result of last year’s acquisition of Actona Technologies, but it was last month’s purchase of RedLine by Cisco’s archrival in the routing market, Juniper, that set tongues wagging as to whether the market leader in networking would snap someone up in response.
The FineGround acquisition is confirmation of that trend and means that the three main players in Web acceleration, FineGround, RedLine and Pivia, have all disappeared into the bowels of other players, with only Pivia being acquired by another start-up (WAN optimization vendor Swan Labs in December). FineGround accelerates Web traffic for portals/app servers (Plumtree, IBM WebSphere, SunOne and SAP Netweaver), ERP and CRM (PeopleSoft, SAP and Siebel), email (Lotus Notes) and custom apps.
It’s also worth noting that on the same day as it acquired RedLine, Juniper also announced the purchase of Peribit Networks, which was one of the leading players in WAN optimization alongside Packeteer and Expand. This means Juniper can offer Layer 4 and Layer 7 traffic shaping, as can Swan Labs, while Cisco has Layer 7 with the FineGround acquisition, but must rely on the compression technology on its routers for Layer 4.
It currently performs very poorly, and less than 1% of their router customers use it, claimed Jef Graham, former CEO of Peribit and now head of the traffic shaping business at Juniper.
So the question now is: will Cisco dig deeper into its seemingly bottomless pockets to acquire someone in WAN optimization? Potential targets would be Packeteer and Expand, but the former is already public and Cisco tends to prefer privately held companies, while Expand has lost some momentum over the last year or so with its decision to migrate its appliances to a hardened Linux environment.
Alternatively, there may be another outfit still in stealth mode that Cisco can find and acquire. Or it may simply beef up its own optimization capabilities on the routers.
In any case, this puts to rest any suspicion, as some analysts had been suggesting, that optimization and acceleration technologies would be sidelined by the next economic boom, when companies would simply deploy more bandwidth to overcome constraints.
