Silver Peak Adds Partner for Data Center WAN Optimization

By David Gross

Privately-held Silver Peak has been among the most quiet of the layer 4-7 acceleration vendors lately.   But Friday, the company spoke up and announced it had a new partner in Japan, Netmarks, for distributing its equipment in the Asian country.

Silver Peak has been looking for a niche to fill, and competing against publicly-traded companies like  Riverbed (RVBD), Blue Coat (BCSI), Cisco (CSCO), and Juniper (JNPR), its message often gets lost in the all noise.   The company, originally known as Cheyenne Networks, was founded in 2004, not long after Riverbed was, but also not long before Riverbed' started to surpass Packeteer, before that company's takeover by Blue Coat.

The company has raised over $60 million since its founding in 2004, $4 million of which came earlier this month.   Its investors include Greylock, Benchmark Capital and Pinnacle Ventures.  

While Riverbed and others have put a lot of effort into mobile apps, Silver Peak has re-focused itself on the data center.   This is really more of a marketing decision than one of technical specs, because there is a lot of common technology across these plaforms, from http pre-fetch to CIFS accleration, and WAN latency has far more to do with the physical medium - fiber, satellite, etc - than whether the network end point is a data center or corporate office building.    Nonethless, concentrating sales and marketing in one area is a sensible strategy for Silver Peak with so many larger competitors in the market.