Steelhead vs WAAS comparison

Steelhead is the leading network optimization and application performance solution chosen by over 30,000 organizations worldwide. The performance of networks and applications directly impacts business productivity. Riverbed draws from nearly two decades of experience in driving network and application performance over Wide Area Networks with its flagship offering, SteelHead. SteelHead delivers the underlying technology that helps enterprises of all sizes maximize the efficiency and performance of the networks and applications used to run modern business. 

SteelHead is proven to dramatically speed up the performance of applications anywhere in the organization while delivering the best end-user experience even under sub optimal network conditions. Reduce bandwidth utilization by up to 95%, deferring costly network bandwidth upgrades. Increase performance by up to 100x for on-premises applications.

Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) is a software- and hardware-integrated, WAN optimization and application acceleration solution, and part of Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN). Cisco WAAS reduces latency and optimizes bandwidth. (4:46 min). Cisco WAAS provides an elastic "scale as you grow" enterprise-wide deployment model with Cisco AppNav and industry-leading scalability for secure acceleration of email, file, web, software-as-a-service (SaaS), video, and VDI applications. Cisco IWAN with Akamai Connect optimizes web and mobile applications by extending the Akamai Intelligent Platform directly into the branch.