Many organizations embark on global multi-million dollar web application deployments only to later discover that their users are unsatisfied with the performance compared to their old client server application. In theory, widely distributed remote and mobile users can access applications from anywhere, increasing convenience and productivity. In reality, portals, CRM, collaboration and other enterprise web applications are delivered over the very chatty HTTP protocol. Instead of finding a nirvana of easily-accessible functionality, users are frustrated with slow performance and administrators struggle with low adoption rates.

Typically organizations try to accomplish web acceleration by caching static objects in a reverse proxy cache, offloading SSL from busy web servers to a network device, and offloading compression from the web servers to a network device. These types of acceleration will improve the time to generate the HTTP response if the web servers are overloaded, but other capabilities are necessary to improve delivery time over the network.