We've got an article this week on WAN optimization. Might not sound like the most emotionally charged topic--until you see comments like this from IT pros who faced network performance problems: "My name became mud as fast as you could spell it."

What surprised me about this article is how personally accountable these IT leaders were for network performance. And how emotional the topic of network performance has become. "The people out there would have lynched me if I didn't show up and do something," one IT manager says--as employees have become utterly dependent on the network to do their jobs.

Big-name vendors have picked up on this market's rising importance, with the likes of Cisco and Microsoft angling to get a bigger piece of it.

I expected this to be a bit of a speeds-and-feeds issue. Turns out, it's more of a desperate-need issue. Of course, that still doesn't mean anyone's going to hand the IT team bouquets when the network runs beautifully.