Prudent move, IMHO. Couple of different but complementary acceleration technologies have been combined and leveraged with Cisco MATE to give enhanced user expeience. At first glance, CDN and WAN acceleration may seem to be similar technologies since both serve content when possible from a replication close to the user, to eliminate delay and cost of fetching it from the original server andserving it at high bandwidth almost instantaneously from a locally cached copy.

A WAN acceleration cache benefits from the reuse of content, for example, when another user has fetched the
content recently, but the improvement is limited by the number of concurrent users (the fewer users, the lower
the chance that the content has been accessed recently), and by how the content is structured (the more
personalized the content, the less likely the same content will have been accessed by another).

The impact of CDN can be much higher because content can be pre-positioned in the cache (avoiding the need
for another user to have fetched it recently), and because the content can be transformed or rewritten to have a
higher hit ratio. Akamai is already active in CDN space to maximize the performance of Akamai-served
content, and automates the process when possible.

Very well thought out product development, IMHO.

Cheers

santanu