- Jim Metzler, Ashton Metzler & Associates
- Distinguished Research Fellow and Co-Founder
- Webtorials Analyst Division
This is the sixth edition of what had previously been called the Application Delivery Handbook. Partially in recognition of the fact that on an ever increasing basis that IT organizations need to support complex services that are comprised of multiple, inter-related applications, this years edition of the handbook is entitled "The 2012 Application and Service Delivery Handbook".
When the first edition was published in 2007 one of the primary goals of the handbook was to help IT organizations understand that successful application delivery involves more than just making sure that protocols such as TCP and CIFS run well over the WAN. Interestingly enough, many of those traditional service delivery challenges are still of concern to the majority of IT organizations. However, as described in this year's handbook, driven largely by the broad adoption of BYOD, virtualization and cloud computing, IT organizations are now facing a new wave of challenges - many of which are far more daunting than anything we have seen before.
Similar to what we did in 2011, the 2012 edition will be published both in its entirety and in a serial fashion. We believe that approach makes the handbook more readable and yet still allows us to provide a holistic view of this very important topic. We also tried to make the handbook more succinct in part by taking reducing content that is now well known.
Because of the great interest in both virtualization and cloud computing, the handbook identifies the management and optimization challenges that are of most interest to IT organizations. The handbook also describes how virtualized application delivery appliances and cloud based optimization, management and security solutions can help IT organizations respond to these challenges. This year's handbook has more of a focus on security than previous editions did.
We hope that the handbook is helpful to you and we invite you to send us suggestions for how you think we should change it for 2013.
Full Report
Part 5: Executive Summary
Part 4: Planning, Management and Security
Part 3: Network and Application Optimization
Part 2: Second Generation Application and Service Delivery Challenges
Part 1: Traditional Application Delivery Challenges
Platinum Sponsors
Cisco Systems, Ipanema Technologies, Netscout
Gold Sponsors
A10 Networks, Akamai, Aryaka, Blue Coat Systems, CA Technologies,
Certeon, Exinda, Radware, Riverbed, VCE, Visual Network Systems
Cisco Systems, Ipanema Technologies, Netscout
Gold Sponsors
A10 Networks, Akamai, Aryaka, Blue Coat Systems, CA Technologies,
Certeon, Exinda, Radware, Riverbed, VCE, Visual Network Systems
Optimization has been one of the key components of all of the previous handbooks. There are, however, a number of changes in this year’s analysis of optimization. One of those changes is that the market research has been updated. Another is that there is a lengthy discussion of virtualization as it applies both to WAN Optimization Controllers (WOCs) and to Application Delivery Controllers. There is also a discussion of the cloud-based services that can negate the need for WOCs as well as a discussion of new functionality, such as Web page optimization, that is showing up as a feature in some ADCs. This year’s analysis of optimization also refreshes the previous discussion of optimizing the performance of the Internet and also discusses the integration of WOC functionality with Internet optimization to provide end to end optimization for IT organizations that backhaul their Internet traffic. This year’s analysis of optimization also highlights the technologies that enable ADCs to support the movement to IPv6.