Globalization and ecommerce have fundamentally reshaped the competitive landscape, and forced companies to operate more efficiently. Mobile technology and broadband networks have enabled employees to work anywhere, and raised their expectations for easy access to centralized applications and corporate databases.

Companies have never been as dependent on software applications to perform their day-to-day operations and achieve their corporate objectives. Yet, the growing use of today's 'Internal' software applications across wide area networks (WANs), or external applications across the Internet, is making it increasingly difficult to obtain optimal and secure performance from these essential applications.

Gaining greater performance from enterprise applications, such as those from Oracle, has become increasingly critical because of escalating pressures on companies today. Yet efforts to improve application performance, especially to remote users, are complicated by network limitations; bandwidth, and especially network latency.

Combined, these trends are generating interest and adoption of a widening array of "on-demand" applications to satisfy companies rapidly changing business requirements. Hosted on the Internet, business applications are easier to own, but that makes the Internet the backbone of your business data. Conversely, employees can be remote users to internal applications, using the Internet as their WAN with the help of VPN technologies. As a result, the line of demarcation between a company's WAN and the Internet is blurring.