Hey, we’re not making any iron-clad promises here, but the graphic accompanying these predictions did, for what it’s worth, include a crystal ball. Actually these predictions on “What 2012 Means for WAN Optimization” are made on better authority than Madame Sosostris’ deck of Tarot cards.

Shawn Cooney, co-founder of Certeon (News - Alert), foresees “a pressure cooker” for 2012, specifically “a mature WAN networking industry with billions of market cap tied up in it, battling it out over a well-known set of capabilities simmering in the pot.”

As Cooney sees it, “customer demand is cranking up the heat, as cloud requirements for WAN optimization shift from proprietary network hardware to flexible, scalable and virtualized software implementations.”

You’d think that with WAN optimization as a service is an expected thing in enterprise networking nowadays and that vendors would have embraced virtualization and cloud computing with a bit more gusto than they have. But as Cooney notes sadly, “the use of WAN optimization in cloud environments is not even a blip on the radar screen.”

Good news, though. By necessity or vision, that will change. “The need for WAN optimization will become abundantly clear as business managers use more and more services within the cloud,” he predicts, adding that for that to happen, resources will increasingly be accessed across the Internet or virtual private WAN clouds.

Not that things have been standing still with WAN optimization, in fact the prediction that they’ll heat up in 2012 is extrapolating the beginnings of a trend that became visible in 2011, with most WAN optimization vendors “playing catch-up with virtualization,” Cooney says, but “could not even present a case for being used in a cloud environment, private or public.”

The key to deriving value from WAN optimization in cloud environments, as Cooney concludes, is “to integrate it with the underlying virtualized infrastructure,” while asking yourself how you can deliver corporate information to users, how you can implement, scale, and manage WAN optimization like any other service and if WAN optimization as it’s currently done in your organization really uses the benefits of virtualization.

“The pressure on enterprise networking is increasing as organizations usher their software, databases, storage, employees, customers, and partners into the age of cloud computing,” Cooney warns, saying hey folks, the bottom line here is that “the future of cloud computing and the efficiency of WAN optimization/application acceleration technologies are irreversibly linked.”

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO East 2012, taking place Jan. 31-Feb. 3 2012, in Miami, FL. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.

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