WAN optimization market drops 12% due to slow demand, says Dell'Oro

The WAN Optimization (WANOP) market declined 12 percent sequentially in the first quarter of 2014 due to seasonality and softening demand for equipment, Dell'Oro Group reports. Although the first quarter is a traditionally slow season for WANOP revenue, the research firm said this quarter was significant, with "the lowest revenues in almost four years." One of the contributing factors to the decline was flat or a drop in branch office expansion. Casey Quillin, director of SAN research at Dell'Oro Group, said that "to answer this trend, vendors are building upon the core feature set of their product platforms in an effort to increase product attractiveness and reignite demand, adding functions such as policy enforcement, network monitoring, and legacy storage optimization." Dell'Oro has more details in this release.