John Katsaros

WAAS Reaches 1000 Customers

In July Cisco announced that it has passed the 1000th customer mark for its WAAS (Wide Area Application Services) product line launched in September, 2006. Passing the 1000th mark in a little more than nine months is a reminder of the breadth and depth of Cisco's reach and what it is capable of doing when it wants to grow its market share quickly. Arch rival Riverbed was quick to point out that it has already passed the 2,500 customer mark. Despite Cisco's growth, Riverbed's financial results from last quarter were impressive -- $54M quarterly revenue -- nearly a 200% growth from the same quarter last year.

"Microsoft Ready"

Packeteer's recent introduction of its iShaper appliance and its relationship with Microsoft may bring about a new turn in the WAN acceleration market.  iShaper uniquely integrates native Microsoft application services (patch management, networking and print services) onto Packeteer's WAN acceleration platform. With all of the changes that have been happening in this business, it's a smart idea for Packeteer to create differentiation by getting closer to Microsoft -- something its Linux based competitors may have trouble replicating.

Operating on All Cylinders

You can calibrate the success of a company by how simply the CEO articulates how the company provides value and Citrix's Mark Templeton got an A at last week's Analyst Conference at the Fairmont in San Francisco.  He explained how Citrix's key value propositions -- performance, security and ROI -- are amplified in value by where Citrix sits in the IT infrastructure next to the applications servers.  From this position Citrix has great insight into the goals and values of the application (compared for example to a traditional WAN device).  Judging from Citrix's continuing revenue growth rate and their 180,000 customers the market likes what they are doing.  Citrix's aggressive acquisition strategy seems to be working: Expertcity (3/04), Net6 (12/04), NetScaler (8/05), Teros (12/07), Reflectent (5/06) and Orbital Data (8/06).  They say they are first or second in most of their markets including being the market leader in the SSL VPN market (ahead of Juniper's Neoteris product) with their Citrix Access Gateway which was acquired from the Net6 acquisition.  What's more, the management teams from most of these acquisitions have stayed on at Citrix.  It's an impressive infrastructure success story that's still being written.