Blue Coat recognised for WAN optimisation solutions

Blue Coat Systems has been ranked as the leader of the WAN optimisation equipment market according to a new report from Gartner.

The report, “Market Share: Application Acceleration Equipment, Worldwide, 3Q08,” ranks Blue Coat with the leading share of market during the third calendar quarter of 2008.

Blue Coat’s market share grew by nearly 19 percent over the prior quarter. The worldwide WAN optimisation market grew nearly four percent from the previous quarter.

“Blue Coat provides a unique, comprehensive approach to WAN optimisation, combining application visibility, acceleration and security together in a way that increasingly appeals to distributed enterprises,” said Bethany Mayer, senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, Blue Coat Systems.

“The WAN optimisation market is no longer about simply accelerating files or applying indiscriminate acceleration techniques to branch office traffic. Companies must now accelerate business-critical applications and manage and distribute corporate video while stopping malware and mitigating the impact of non-business applications.”

Blue Coat ProxySG and PacketShaper appliances control what passes across the WAN and through the Internet gateway.

Enterprises can accelerate applications to branch offices using the optimisation technologies built into the appliances, including protocol optimisation, compression, bandwidth management, object caching and byte caching.

The appliances also enable organisations to meter the use of recreational and non-business applications, such as streaming media and movie downloads whilst protecting content.