The Forrester Wave™: WAN Optimization Appliances, Q3 2007

Forrester evaluated leading WAN optimization appliance vendors across 65 criteria and found that Riverbed and Juniper have established early leadership. They have demonstrated early innovation in the most critical optimization techniques like caching, data de-duplication, and advanced compression. Silver Peak leads WAN optimization appliance pure plays with the most scalable solution. Cisco and Blue Coat provide the full suite of capabilities but excel in offering technology that plugs into existing router and proxy products, respectively. Expand and Packeteer have well-established traffic management boxes with additional WAN optimization capabilities but need further integration to capture leadership positions. Citrix and F5 deliver good point products today but will offer much stronger devices when they integrate WAN optimization with their existing application delivery controllers. Ultimately, this is a tightly contested market, and we urge you to focus on optimization, scalability, security, and mobility criteria to determine the most appropriate solution.