Up until a few years ago, few network organizations paid much attention to ensuring the successful performance of applications. In the current environment, ensuring the successful performance of applications is a top of mind issue for the vast majority of network organizations.

Unfortunately, ensuring acceptable application performance is very difficult in part because it involves multiple functions. As is widely acknowledged in the industry press, WAN optimization is an important component of ensuring acceptable application performance. WAN optimization on its own, however, is not sufficient. Some of the other functionality that must be part of an integrated application delivery solution are planning and management. As simple as this sounds, most application delivery solutions do not provide a rich set of well integrated planning, optimization and management functionality. In fact, some WAN optimizations products can cause existing planning and management functionality to break.

This brief will identify some of the shortcomings of the existing WAN optimizations products and will describe a recent announcement by NetQoS^® and Cisco that discussed how the two companies have worked together to integrate NetQoS’s SuperAgent^® with Cisco’s Wide Area Application Services^® (WAAS) devices. In particular, this brief will describe what these companies accomplished and how this integration overcomes some of the current shortcomings in the market.