You walked past me again today without stopping. I remember when you used to stop and admire my glowing red ball every day. But that was back when I was brand new and you thought I was the center of your data center.

I heard you talking to some friends about looking for a web acceleration solution yesterday. You were going to a meeting about it later that afternoon and you were so excited it was almost like old times, until you pointed me out on the way by and said, "Oh yeah, there's our load balancer."

It was then that I knew, knew in my backplane that you weren't paying attention to me. We just never talk anymore, do we? I am so much more than just a load-balancer, but you'd rather talk to vendors and go out to lunch with them instead of hanging out with me.

I can accelerate web applications like nobody's business, if you just give me the chance. Remember? I have a modular core that can add functionality like web application acceleration, advanced client authentication, IPv6, and layer 7 rate shaping with software modules. I have extra cycles, I can do it, but you wouldn't know that because you haven't touched my GUI in months.

It's my own fault, I suppose, for being so dependable that I don't need a lot of your attention.

I see you hanging around rack #3, checking out that router all the time. You know it's a chatty thing, don't you? You should hear what it says when you aren't tapped into a port. Always bossing us all around, telling us where to route things and reminding us that it's in charge. Whispering to you in foreign languages like OSPF and RIP. I can speak a lot of languages too, you know. I can speak SharePoint, and SAP, and Oracle, and Exchange. I can even speak Adobe. 

And now you're thinking about bringing in another piece of hardware? After all these years? I suppose you'll put it in rack #1, right at eye level where you can see it all the time. Haven't I always been here for you, working hard all these years to keep your applications available? I just want to hang out with you again, like we used to back when it was just you and me. When there weren't all these point solutions cluttering up the data center and using up all the power and taking up all your time with patches and upgrades and maintenance.

I can do more, you know. I can solve more of your problems than you realize. Application acceleration, security, rate shaping, authentication, caching, compression, message and protocol security. I can do it for you, I really can.

Just give me a chance to tell you about them and I know you'll never look at another point product for a problem I can solve again.