This article on SearchEnterpriseWAN.com provides an important review of the factors, drivers and evaluations of vendor choices in the WAN optimization controllers (WOC) market. Dr. Jim Metzler of Ashton Metzler and Associates produced the guide.

Some of the factors that Dr. Metzler finds that are driving adoption of WOCs within the enterprise include:

• Organizations are deploying WOCs to implement network and application optimization on branch office networks
• Organizations are increasingly taking applications out of branch offices and consolidating in centralized data centers
• Headquarters now have a minority of employees working at the site
• Remote employees make up the vast majority and are accessing applications over the WAN
• These WANs suffer from low-speed, low-latency, poor quality, and poor performance

Some of the WOC adoption drives that Dr. Metzler highlights include:

• Organizations are increasing their use of Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Organizations are increasing their use of public and private cloud computing
• The amount of application traffic transiting these WANs is forecasted to increase

The guide is designed to help IT create a short list of WOCs to investigate and to provide benchmarks and characteristics to compare WOC vendors and products. Well worth the read if you are in the market for WAN optimization.