An application delivery controller (ADC) is a network device in the datacenter that helps perform common tasks done by web sites in an effort to remove load from the web servers themselves. Many also provide load balancing. They usually sit between the firewall/router and the web farm. The ADC is in many cases described as the next generation load balancer.

ADCs tend to offer features like compression, cache, connection multiplexing, application layer security, SSL offload, content switching combined with basic server load balancing. They also tend to offer more advanced features such as content manipulation, advanced routing strategies as well as highly configurable server health monitoring.

Application acceleration products are available from many companies. This market segment is now becoming fragmented into two general areas: 1) general network optimization and 2) application/framework specific optimization. Both types of devices improve performance, but the latter is usually much more aware of optimization strategies that work best with a particular application framework, focusing on ASP.NET application performance tuning, or AJAX application performance tuning, for example. There is growing consensus that the application acceleration market is moving towards more convergence between the network and the application layers

Computer application streaming is a form of on-demand software distribution.

The basic concept of application streaming has its foundation in the way modern computer programming languages and operating systems produce and run application code. Only specific parts of a computer program need to be available at any instance for the end user to perform a particular function. This means that a program need not be fully installed on a client computer, but parts of it can be delivered over the network as and when they are required.

Application streaming is usually combined with application virtualization, so that applications are not installed in the traditional sense.^{[clarification needed]}

An application is Packaged and stored on a streaming server.Packaging or sequencing produces an image of the application in a way that either orders delivery and/or predictively optimizes delivery to the client.

The initial launch of an application would be important for the end user and the Packaging process might be optimized to achieve this. Once launched, common functions would be followed. As these functions are requested by the end user, these may be Streamed in a similar manner. In this case the client is pulling the application from the stream server. Otherwise, the full application might be delivered from the server to the client in background. In this case, the server pushes the application to the client.