Cisco lifts the lid on female-recruitment drive

Right at the front of the exhibition was Cisco's demonstration of its latest application acceleration software, WAAS Mobile.

WAAS Mobile accelerates applications to and from mobile workers in a similar way to Cisco's previous WAAS offering, which acclerates applications between companies' headquarters and branch offices.

Acceleration is carried out by reducing the number of TCP roundtrips between the server and the client, and by the use of caching technology.

Cisco set up two notebooks to demonstrate the benefits: one device had WAAS Mobile software installed and the other did not. The demonstrator made each device download a 5.19MB PowerPoint slide from Cisco's headquarters in San Jose.

Unsurprisingly, the notebook containing the software won the race, downloading the file in one second, compared with 30 seconds for the other PC.

Although a 30-fold performance gain is impressive, it is unusual for applications in a real-world scenario to be accelerated by this order of magnitude.

Speaking to ZDNet.co.uk at the event, George Kurian, vice president and general manager of Cisco's application delivery division, said a twofold performance gain might be expected for a PowerPoint presentation.

That figure is dependent upon a range of factors, including how much spare capacity and latency there is on the link, and whether the file has been seen by the user's WAAS Mobile client in the past.