The Cisco® Wide Area Virtualization Engine (WAVE) appliances extend the Cisco WAN optimization appliance portfolio to provide the industry's only branch-office appliance family that incorporates comprehensive WAN optimization, embedded virtualization for local hosting, and branch-office video delivery. This solution allows IT organizations to centralize applications and storage in the data center while maintaining LAN-like application performance, and rapidly deliver local branch-office IT services while reducing the branch-office device footprint.

Cisco WAVE appliances are designed to enable local hosting of branch-office IT services using a network-embedded virtualization architecture. This architecture maintains native performance for WAN optimization while using the same hardware platform for additional hosted services.
The WAVE family supports a wide range of deployment scenarios with a low entry price point and features Microsoft-validated virtualization. This approach is unlike that of other solutions, which reposition data center server virtualization technology for branch-office environments.