You basically had no reliable backup for five years, until Sarbanes-Oxley came along. The office manager has taken the backup tapes home and put them on the mantle.

There is still a per-CPU license, and whoever controls the branch office architecture controls the overall architecture. Cisco has made it clear they will enter the market and IBM will roll something out. Some things will be built into Windows. Microsoft is pushing the appliance vendors to use Longhorn instead of Linux or Unix.

Remote office consolidation is a business problem that requires a holistic approach. To succeed, enterprises must choose solutions that address all data access needs of the remote office -- not just remote file access. And, once remote office data is centralized, you can't stop there. Companies need to think through how the additional data will impact their existing SAN, backup and disaster recovery, and bandwidth infrastructures in order to effectively manage the newly centralized data.

Encrypting browser traffic prevents WAN optimization controllers from performing their optimization functions. When selecting a WOC vendor, it is important to understand their strategy for dealing with encrypted traffic like SSL.

Customers look to application acceleration solutions as a way to maximize their data center investments and contain their infrastructure and operational costs. As these deployments become more mainstream, customers require solutions that remove the complexity from solving their application performance problems.

This is a strong entry from F5, and it's a hot market, so other companies will move into this space.