Source: Gartner ADC article.

Gartner released the magic quadrant report for Application Delivery Controllers.

The market for data-center-based solutions to optimize the delivery of applications across the network continues to develop, and our expectations increase with each revision of this Magic Quadrant. As a result, the Magic Quadrant axis depicts a shift up and to the right with each revision. Consequently, vendors must progress to maintain their positions in each new Magic Quadrant.

The ADC market provides asymmetrical solutions to improve the performance, efficiency, deployment and security of a wide range of applications. New use cases of the ADC technology continue to emerge, reflecting significant innovation in the market. These technologies apply across a growing base of enterprise applications that may use the Internet, or may have little or no roots in Internet and browser-based technologies. Although the market emerged from load-balancing solutions designed to improve the availability and reliability of websites, load balancing and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) termination for basic HTML traffic are no longer viable by themselves.

ADCs are often key components of diverse environments, such as portals, ERP systems, Microsoft Outlook and Office Communications Server (OCS), control points for virtualization, adjuncts to enterprise service buses (ESBs) or a service within service-oriented architecture (SOA), and, increasingly, as an element of application development environments. A more recent innovation is the emergence of software-based ADCs (softADCs) that can be deployed in more-flexible form factors. The primary interest has come from cloud providers that can more easily scale their environments as business dictates.

Most advanced platform (AP) ADCs incorporate rule-based extensibility that enables customers to customize the behavior of their AP ADCs. In addition, many AP ADCs incorporate programmatic control interfaces — open APIs — that enable them to be controlled by external systems, including application servers, data center management and provisioning applications, and network and system management applications.

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