Aryaka Networks, a provider of cloud-based application acceleration and WAN optimization solution, announced it has received Frost & Sullivan’s prestigious "Product Innovation of the Year" award in North America for WAN optimization for 2010.

Key to Aryaka's leadership in WAN optimization, according to Zeff Ibrahim, Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) Research Analyst, is a network design that allows customers to overcome the often severe ramp-up times and "exorbitant" network investment required to deploy WAN optimization, company officials said. 

Participating companies were ranked on five metrics -- product innovation, leading-edge technology, value-added features, customer ROI, and potential for customer acquisition and penetration. Aryaka, according to company officials, outranked all competitors across these categories.

While leading, entrenched WAN optimization providers received “good” or “fair” rating in these categories, Aryaka scored “excellent” in all categories.

“Aryaka's cloud-based solution for WAN optimization and application acceleration virtually eliminates the need for on-premise equipment at a company's headquarters and branch locations,” Ibrahim added.

The cloud-based solution, according to Ibrahim, reduces the exorbitant capital investment in this historically capital-intensive technology to zero. Further, it allows the service to be provisioned typically in minutes -- versus the more common phased, two-month or longer rollout. 

“By enforcing cost containment and rapid time-to-productivity, Aryaka opens WAN optimization to the vastly underserved mid-market. It's a truly disruptive attack on the status quo,” Ibrahim added.

“Aryaka set out to deliver a new model for WAN optimization and application acceleration that critics, quite literally, said could not be done,” said Ajit Gupta, founder and CEO of Aryaka Networks, in a statement.

“We never doubted that a technology that so profoundly enables enterprises to outperform their competitors could be re-architected to extend the benefits of that technology to mid-market organizations that, by nature, live with restrictive capital budgets and IT staffs,” Gupta added.

Back in October Aryaka announced that IDG's Network World (News - Alert) magazine has named Aryaka one of its "25 New IT Companies to Watch" for 2010, just over a month after the launch of Aryaka cloud-based WAN optimization platform.