Please indulge a little bravado machismo here, but this picture is very applicable to today’s topic.
(BTW, I’m the second diver from the left).
The load balancing/application markets are interesting in that they’ve always been hyper-competitive. There have been several dustups even on the load balancing mailing list over the years.
In the budget market, there’s not one single dominant player. There are a couple of players that combined dominate the market, but I can’t imagine any of them has more than 30% of the total budget market individually (totally unscientific, I have no quantitative data to support that in any way, it’s totally POOMA [pulled out of my ass]).
In the premium market, the only time a really dominant player has manifested itself was after the dot-com bust. F5 might be considered the dominant player, but Citrix isn’t far behind and there are a lot of other players keeping F5 from being the Cisco (the router/switch Cisco, not the load balancing Cisco) of the load balancing world. During the dot-com boom, no one was dominant. You had Radware, F5, ArrowPoint, Alteon, and Foundry all duking it out, with other players also throwing in for good measure.
In the traditional network world, switches and router, the closest possibly to brick and morter, you’ve got one vendor dominating everything. Same with auction sites, same with search, same with desktop operating systems. (Although in all the really interesting spaces, such as load balancing, WAN acceleration, XML appliacnes, etc., tons of little upstarts are competing [some with huge valuations].)
There’s an interesting dynamic in areas where there are tons of Davids throwing rocks at Goliaths, and when there is just a bunch of Davids throwing rocks at each other (or, as the picture shows above, a swarm of sharks). Right now, the budget market is the later.
