The battle for supremacy in the WAN optimisation market continues to intensify, with Riverbed Technology and Juniper Networks out in front, according to a recent report by analyst firm Forrester.

The report evaluated WAN optimisation appliance vendors across 65 criteria grouped into three areas: current offerings, strategy and market presence. The main finding was that Riverbed and Juniper are leading the pack, demonstrating early innovation in the most critical optimisation techniques like caching, data de-duplication and advanced compression.

Report author Robert Whiteley said he was impressed with Riverbed. "Riverbed is an unbelievable upstart story that has taken the WAN optimisation market by storm, catapulting Riverbed to a market-leading position," he said.

Whiteley said Juniper owes its prominence in the market to its $330m acquisition in 2005 of pioneering WAN optimisation vendor Peribit Networks. " Juniper's current offering is strong but not market-leading," he said. "Its strategy, however, leads all vendors. Juniper is adept at targeting managed services alternatives, which is critical to the mainstream adoption of WAN optimisation."

Although Riverbed came out on top in Forrester's survey, the research firm did mark it down on its capabilities for managing mobile users. The vendor addressed this perceived shortcoming recently when it launched Steelhead Mobile, which uses a dedicated appliance called the Steelhead Mobile Controller (SMC) that runs Riverbed Optimisation System (RiOS) 1.0 firmware.

Riverbed marketing director Mark Lewis said the system is based on the vendor's flagship Steelhead WAN optimisation firmware, and is aimed at firms that have one office and many remote workers as well as branch office employees who use wireless LAN connections.

When users connect to the system, client software is automatically installed onto their laptop, which currently has to be running Windows 2000 or XP - Vista support is due in September. Riverbed has no support plans for Mac or Linux users, but Lewis said the company is watching enterprise adoption of non-Windows systems closely.
Lewis said SMC addresses firms' WAN bandwidth limitations, and also both transport protocol and application-specific protocol "chattiness" and latency. The appliance is designed to accelerate Microsoft Cifs and Mapi protocols, thereby boosting the transfer speeds of Office data and Exchange emails.

Riverbed said Steelhead Mobile should be available in the autumn using a concurrent licensing model, which allows 1,000 installs on employees' laptops, but limits simultaneous connections to 300.

Pricing per mobile user is expected to be around £45, with the SMC costing £6,500.