"The deal gives an immediate boost to our core technology, and gets it into the hands of far more customers in a form factor and to a market segment that we simply hadn't targeted and did not plan to target," he says.

And the experts concur. EMA's Frey says that network management and optimization are particularly important in light of the huge, fast changes that are occurring at the application layer.

"As much as you would like to be able to handle that all with the core networks, it's very difficult to handle the diversity and change and the potential problems that threaten performance and effectiveness of the networking tier," he says.

Email Jon Gold at jgold@nww.com and follow him on Twitter at @NWWJonGold.

in Network World's LAN & WAN section.