And the survey says ...

We're kicking off another new ESG Research initiative. This time we're  looking at the increasingly popular -- and confusing -- topic of branch office optimization. It's a market opportunity we've sized to be about $1B plus.

So, why is it so confusing? Well, as I've been saying for several months now, delivering and protecting IT services to branch offices over a WAN can be slow, expensive, and complex. Enter WAFS, WAAS, WADS, WAN acceleration, WAN optimization. Whatever you call it, these solutions make this process easier and much more cost-effective for end-users. Simple enough, right?

But what about the data protection folks -- you know, vendors like Asigra, Avamar, Data Domain, Signiant, and Symantec? Where do they fit it? This is where it starts getting hazy.

Like the pure-play optimization guys, these vendors make it easier to move data over the WAN, but they are focused on data protection. And then there are folks like Kashya (okay, EMC now) that do a little of both: they do remote replication/CDP and WAN optimization.

Are these products competitive or complementary? What are the benefits of implementing one technology versus another? What are early adopters doing and what benefits are they seeing?

These are just some of the questions we'll answer in the upcoming survey. It's going to be jam-packed with helpful nuggets.