Tacit Networks and Orbital Data, two WAN optimization vendors, are offering products for enterprise-wide WAN optimization and application acceleration. The products are designed to support mobile employees and teleworkers. Most existing appliances for enhancing performance of centralize Web applications and consolidating file servers and storage generally focus on larger branch offices comprising between 15 and 100 users. Some large enterprises plan to deploy thousands of performance-boosting appliances, however, so Tacit Networks introduced a small-footprint device that will support five or fewer users. Orbital Data added a Windows client that will work with a centralized data center appliance and extend the benefits of its WAN optimization to mobile and remote workers. The need for better application performance has become more important as organizations move to consolidate their information technology assets, The continuing use of the Web for enterprise applications has also emphasized the need for improvement in application performance. Current users of Tacit's Ishared Enterprise at Silicon Laboratories, which is in the midst of a data consolidation project involving reduction of the footprint, maximization of head count, and improved accountability for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, saw substantial improvements in the time it takes to open and save a file. A 2.5 MB Excel spreadsheet over a T-1 link with standard latency of 250 milliseconds takes just over five minutes to open from a remote office in Singapore. Using the Tacit product with an uncached file, the same document can be opened in 14 seconds. Once it is cached, it only takes four seconds to open. Tacit's new Ishared Mini can reduce the time it takes to save that same spreadsheet file from five minutes to 17 seconds. Users of Orbital Data's Orbital Edge product at Smith International, an oil drilling bit supplier, found that it reduced the roundtrip time for data transfer from ten seconds to two seconds.