ARN has learned ahead of a public announcement that Riverbed has traded in Westcon Group for Avnet for local distribution.

After having fallen behind in the WAN optimization market, Blue Coat has made changes to help take on a new strategy, including Monday's announcement of David Murphy as new president and COO.

Continued growth in the data center network equipment market has opened a window of opportunity for vendors looking to cut into industry leader Cisco's share, and, for those with the right products, "the time to strike is now," one analyst says.

Anyone who has endured the painful wait of a slow-loading application is familiar with the frustration and lost productivity that follows. That's the problem that motivated Riverbed and Akamai to join forces for a new SaaS acceleration offering, with the objective of resolving SaaS application performance issues that were previously untouchable.

After watching customers continually download and install one of the vendor's free, limited products from the company website, Silver Peak CEO Rick Tinsley was interested to see how they would respond to the same access to its more advanced products.

IT execs know they will have to deploy IPv6 at some point, but where to begin? One approach that establishes some  IPv6 capability without spending a lot of time or money is to start at the perimeter.

Riverbed today announced the release of updates to its Steelhead network performance products as well as its Granite product line, which is based on the edge virtual server infrastructure approach that Riverbed is pushing. Whereas the former aims to boost network performance for the customers that are concerned about application delivery, the latter may attract more attention from the infrastructure management industry.

In yet another sign that growing revenues are reshaping the vendor outlook in the network management sector, Gartner recently named vendor Silver Peak one of the leaders in its magic quadrant for the WAN optimization market.

Networking will be an exciting field in 2011. With that in mind, ARN asked six prominent vendors in the space for predictions and trends that can be expected to be big in the New Year.