Radware Raises Web App Acceleration Stakes

Application Delivery Controller vendor Radware on April 30 announced it will shift its strategic gears as a result of its acquisition of Covelight Systems.

The small, North Carolina-based startup, which Radware acquired for $16 million, markets a product capable of capturing detailed business events from Web transactions.

Radware, as a part of its new Business Smart Networks initiative, will use the Covelight technology to make networks more responsive to changing business conditions, the company said.

The Covelight Inflight appliance, originally developed as a real-time fraud detection system, passively listens to Web transactions, captures events, transforms those events and feeds them over multiple channels in real time to business applications, according to Roy Zisapel, president and CEO of Radware, in Tel Aviv, Israel.

The events can be used by a range of applications to allow enterprises to optimize their business processes, offer new products and services on the fly, and stop identity theft or online fraud.

The Business Smart Network initiative focuses on three requirements: the need for the network to understand the applications traversing it, the need to understand the user ID instead of just the IP address, and the need to understand real business events, rather than just log packet header information, according to Zisapel.

Although Radware on its own had been working to satisfy the first requirement through its application-smart APSolute service architecture, the Inflight appliance's ability to capture real-time transactions and transform and feed business events embedded in user session traffic addresses the other requirements, he said.

"Today when we're deployed in front of a Web server farm, we route traffic based on information, load balance servers and do bandwidth management. Tomorrow we need the network to understand Roy Zisapel is moving money from one account to another or doing a routine transaction, and based on that we want to offer him a loan. That's what we mean by - a - business-smart network," he explained.

The Inflight appliance can feed back-end analytic systems without requiring integration with the application. Each appliance can handle up to 10,000 transactions per second, while multiple appliances can be load balanced to scale beyond that.

"Covelight can identify very specific events happening in a browser-based application and then feed those events to other systems. It lets you identify elements on the wire that they'll flag and then feed those elements in real time … to other systems," said Mark Fabbi, vice president and distinguished analyst with Gartner.

"They see everything, but they aren't inline from a transaction perspective. They don't do the analytics themselves. They identify events and pass those to another event processor to apply intelligence around that," Fabbi said.

Fabbi said he believes Radware's move will "raise the stakes" in the ADC market. "It will get people thinking about the whole ADC value proposition. That is the place in the network where you apply a wide variety of services. It's another way of making the network more application-fluent," he said.

Copyright 2007 by Ziff Davis Media, Distributed by United Press International