Late last week industry analyst firm MarketsandMarkets issued a new report on the WAN optimization market that predicted a CAGR of 18.8% from 2014 to 2019, with North America expected to be the largest single market and the APAC region predicted to have a CAGR of 21.2% in that period.

The predicted growth more than doubles the market in just five years. This may be astounding to many – especially compared to overall tepid network equipment market forecasts – but if you drill down into it, you’ll quickly discover what we at Array have been promoting for quite some time:

WAN optimization is the ‘secret sauce’ that makes networks and applications work. It’s that simple. But it’s also a bit complex.

Network/application performance used to be fairly straightforward. Given adequate bits and bytes and speeds and feeds, you could be confident that your network and applications were performing at their peak.

The last five years have been game-changing though. BYOD means that employees can work anywhere, anytime. Applications like Exchange, Oracle and others have become integral to getting the job done. New work concepts like ROWE (Results-Oriented Work Environment) have cropped up, encouraging employees to focus on what matters: the bottom line.

It’s no longer ‘good enough’ to assure the C-suite that your network is providing adequate throughput. What matters now is employees’ perception of your network’s ability to supporttheir efforts in turn. Excessive downtime on a critical application like Exchange server? Slow response times from Oracle? These types of things cause headaches for employees – which will soon become your headache.

Add some Secret Sauce

WAN optimization works by streamlining the data that traverses your network. Put simply, data de-duplication and differencing (with caching) means that data that once was sent multiple times to a local data store now needs be sent only once. Traffic is prioritized so performance for end-users is greatly enhanced. TCP, and even relatively arcane protocols are optimized to eliminate redundant and chatty traffic. Compression further reduces the amount of traffic transmitted over the WAN.

This is, of course, just a small sampling of the many ingredients that combine to make WAN optimization the ‘secret sauce’ of network and application performance. To learn more, visit our WAN optimization solution page, or our aCelera WAN optimization controllers product page.

You can read the original article here.