Roundup: Gartner, Cisco, HP, SAP, Citrix

Here’s our review of noteworthy news in the data center industry:

Gartner: PaaS to reach $707.4 million in 2011.  Gartner announced that Worldwide platform as a service (PaaS) revenue is on pace to reach $707.4 million in 2011, up from $512.4 million in 2010.  According to Gartner's research, the market will experience consistent growth with worldwide PaaS revenue totaling $1.8 billion in 2015. As products in the market expanded to include other middleware capabilities as a service, PaaS enterprises took notice and the application integration and middleware (AIM) market expanded. "When application infrastructure is deployed on-premises, organizations can take a best-of-breed approach and integrate all acquired components in their data center. When middleware services are acquired in the cloud from different PaaS providers – the services remain in different data centers and resist optimized integration. Mainstream users of PaaS services will likely look for providers that deliver comprehensive and integrated PaaS functionality suites – forcing the specialist offerings to consolidate," said Yefim Natis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. Gartner analysts predict a rapid aggregation of PaaS offerings into suites of functionalities, providing users with well-integrated and optimized platform services (from the same or different suppliers), co-located in the same data center to provide appropriate levels of performance, security, manageability and availability.

Cisco Evolves WAN Optimization Appliances.  Cisco(CSCO) introduced the next generation of its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) appliances - the Cisco family of WAN (wide area network) optimization solutions. The WAAS appliances improve the user experience across their entire network infrastructure by providing up to five times the bandwidth and supporting up to three times the users than the previous generation. The appliance models are split out among the deployment types they serve: branch offices, large branch offices, and an organization version that is integrated as an on-demand WAAS on the Cisco Integrated Services Router Generation 2. Cisco is also announcing Cisco WAAS v4.4 software, which brings together application and network optimization with the industry’s first context-aware DRE (Data Redundancy Elimination).  "Today’s enterprise networks are experiencing increased bandwidth-heavy applications such as video, virtual desktops and cloud services," said Rohit Mehra, director, Enterprise Communications Infrastructure at IDC. "The momentum behind this trend will only grow as cloud applications take center stage in the enterprise. WAN optimization and application delivery solutions like Cisco’s WAAS appliances provide IT and network managers with a compelling solution that scales and improves application performance across the network."

HP and SAP partner to accelerate the cloud.  HP and SAP AG announced an agreement for HP Enterprise Services to provide cloud-based delivery of SAP applications that enable enterprises to deploy applications in a scalable and affordable manner. The first SAP application to be delivered by HP Enterprise Services via its cloud platform is the SAP Customer Relationship Management rapid-deployment solution. As a SAP-certified provider HP brings their global data centers to the partnership with secure processing capacity, with security and privacy policies that can rapidly adjust to meet each client's specific needs. “Cloud delivery models are becoming a top priority for clients due to their quick deployments, cost-effectiveness and overall flexibility,” said Eric Clark, vice president, Enterprise Application Services, HP Enterprise Services. “In collaboration with SAP, HP is empowering clients to dramatically increase the availability and speed of business information via the cloud, paving a flexible path toward future growth.”

Citrix updates NetScaler MPX and SDX.  Citrix Systems (CTXS) unveiled four new additions to its leading Citrix NetScaler MPX and SDX product lines, delivering the unprecedented performance and virtualization that businesses require in the Cloud Era. The new NetScaler MPX and SDX platforms, including the 50 Gbps SDX 21550 appliance, provide the right networking footprint to tackle large-scale network consolidation initiatives with the flexibility to scale without additional hardware. The new SDX appliances integrate virtualization directly into the network fabric to support up to 40 completely independent NetScaler instances for large-scale consolidation projects. “Citrix continues to demonstrate a relentless focus on improving the performance of virtualized, cloud-delivered applications, including at the network infrastructure layer.  This new set of NetScaler capabilities represents an aggressive move to leverage both virtualization and hardware advances to elevate the state of the art in Application Delivery Controllers," said Jim Frey, Managing Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).