In time, interfaces can be unified, product incompatibilities addressed and optimizations discovered. Given Nokia's enthusiasm for integrated network appliances, don't be surprised to see full geographic load-balancing introduced with technology from a partner such as F5 Networks. Several load-balancing providers also are ideally situated to begin taking at least a few infrastructure monkeys off merchants' backs. Similarly, Rad provides a corporate umbrella covering Radware and its load-balancer, as well as firewall company Radguard. And if Intel is serious about its goal of capturing 10 percent of the networking market, it would make sense for it to acquire a major firewall product and provide at least modest integration with IPivot.
Strategic agreements can also help merchants and suppliers.
For example, joint development between Radware and StarBurst Software lets servers be shut off for purposes of load-balancing at those times when StarBurst's Omnicast is performing replication used for content distribution. Tightly integrating the firewall with load-balancing products also gets around certain interoperability problems. For example, merchants may implement two load-balancers to prevent a single point of failure, only to find that the firewall interprets this as a security breach and blocks traffic. Similarly, some firewalls stop traffic directed to geographically different sites by load-balancing processes. If you can think of a better place to unleash it, let me know.