Over the past 10 years, the use of applications to enable business processes has evolved drastically. What was once a nice-to-have is now a mainstream staple that exists at the core of business, education, and other operations across the globe. As application usage has increased, response time has become more and more important-- and with good reason. Time wasted while waiting for data is money wasted and productivity lost. Factors affecting response time today include congested WAN pipes, inefficient/chatty protocols, and latency due to long distances between users and data. All these factors are exacerbated as applications and data resources are consolidated, centralized, or outsourced. In...