Let The Application Delivery Wars Begin

It is possible that 5 minutes passed -- though it could have been less -- between the time that I got briefed by the executive team from F5 about their Big IP announcement and my phone rang with the folks from NetScaler on the horn clamoring to provide their take on the F5 project that, until this week, was code named "Buffalo."

For F5, the Big IP announcement is the culmination of a two-year-soup-to-nuts revamp of their flag ship traffic management offerings to support the multi-media enterprise networks of today. For the lesser known NetScaler, the announcement is both a challenge and an opportunity to take advantage of some press that would highlight the growing demand for what Gartner now calls the application delivery (AD) space.

The aggressive marketing and counter-marketing efforts (and I mean that in a good way) of both companies illustrates just how important a role they think AD is going to play in enterprise networks, and it illustrates the opening salvos in what will be an intensely fought battle for the hearts and minds of enterprise technologists.

Although Gartner analysts point out that browser-based traffic has been running across the corporate network for some time, it is a more-recent evolution for true mission-critical applications to move to these technologies.

Since nearly all major enterprise operations are destined to eventually require Web-enabled delivery capabilities as we approach the second half of the decade, organizations are going to have to develop a specific strategy for optimizing all this traffic throughout their operations.Migrating to Web-enabled applications has a number of complex network effects and interdependencies. Good planning and design can mitigate many of these effects. However, benefits will be elusive until organizations can achieve cooperation and closer working ties between applications, servers and network teams.

That is where application delivery technologies come in.

"Content providers, e-commerce leaders and large enterprises continue to extend the reach and business objectives for their core applications," states Mark Fabbi, vice president of enterprise communications, Gartner. "In the past, the complexity and lack of scalability of legacy load balancers and limited functionality appliances would impose a cap on how organizations could extend applications to their ever growing end user bases. Fortunately, next generation application delivery systems make the large-scale delivery of web-based applications more achievable and cost-effective."