She noted how consumers and soon enterprise users will ramp up their demands as they adopt more VOIP applications, web-based TV and video on demand. "These are often longer sessions on the network and involve more chatty protocols that can affect the performance of applications running on Internet," said Hui. "Adding bandwidth is not the answer and traditional WAN optimization solutions are designed to solve only branch-to-branch communications."

So for carriers and service providers, there is a need for new technology to be adopted to solve the application performance issues for their Internet customers. But this also has implications for many enterprises as they seek to utilize more web-delivered applications.

Hui sees web acceleration as the top networking trend in 2007 and she expects this area to experience substantial growth. She also noted that many web-enabled applications aren't designed to run on the web-this causes performance problems.

Plagued by security

While optimization is clearly a priority for many network managers, many believe security rules the roost as the most critical trend in the market right now. "In the enterprise market, by far the largest trend is securing the network," said Brendan Leitch, service provider marketing director, APAC, Juniper Networks.