Cisco Widens WAN Optimization

SAN JOSE, CA -- Cisco (NasdaqGS:CSCO - News) today announced that it has passed another milestone in the rapidly evolving wide area network (WAN) optimization market with the deployment of its 1000th customer. Since launching its Wide Area Applications Services (WAAS) solution in September 2006, Cisco has seen broad adoption of its product across multiple industries, helping customers to solve IT challenges such as branch office application performance, remote backup and server consolidation.

Cisco WAAS is a powerful application-acceleration and solution for branch offices that helps optimize the performance of any TCP-based application operating in a wide-area network (WAN) environment. This allows information technology (IT) organizations to consolidate costly distributed servers and storage into centrally managed data centers and to deploy new applications centrally, while still offering LAN-like application performance for remote users.

"WAN optimization is no longer a luxury; it's a requirement. Increasingly, IT decision-makers want the option to integrate WAN optimization and application acceleration into a single branch-office device," says Robin Gareiss, executive vice president and senior founding partner of Nemertes Research. "Already, 17% of organizations are using all-in-one devices, and 55% are using WAN optimization. Moving forward, they want devices to provide switching/routing, security, voice over IP, optimization, and WAFS. Vendors who can provide these capabilities independently -- and as part of an integrated solution -- will end up on the short lists of enterprises assessing the market."

Cisco Systems Inc.