"Enterprises are much more serious now in addressing areas of application delivery," said Lo. "In 2005, whenever there was a WAN problem, customers may have directly gone for bandwidth upgrade and in many cases might not have truly identified the cause of the problem."

She added that "WAN optimization approaches in past years was more like firefighting for many enterprises-that mindset has changed in 2006."

Spotlight on Web users

Linda Hui, managing director of network management provider, F5 Networks Hong Kong, has observed more corporations requesting for faster delivery of their applications, not only to their branch office but also to their Internet users.

"Delivering high-bandwidth applications on the internet is a big challenge and many organizations have been asking for solutions that can cater for higher throughput and to accelerate web traffic delivery to users," she said.