Steelhead, put out by the relatively young company Riverbed, has been making waves in WAN optimization. Positioned as a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant, the appliance even edged out our gold award winner, Cisco's WAAS, in two key areas: net WAN throughput improvement and transfer time improvement.

"Our objective is to make a WAN and all the applications on it feel like a LAN," Alan Saldich, Riverbed vice president, told SearchCIO last fall. The company has made good progress toward that objective: A whopping 95% of Product Leadership survey respondents scored the Steelhead good or excellent in WAN throughput improvement, and it got the same response for transfer time improvements.

The only fields where it fell down (though still scoring well) were manageability and application-specific support, but even in these categories it received no ratings worse than "fair." Some users proclaimed it an "awesome product" and "excellent."