Blue Coat Systems Enhances Operating Software for its Blue Coat PacketShaper Appliances

Blue Coat (News - Alert) Systems Inc. announced the release of a new version of operating software for its Blue Coat PacketShaper appliances.

In a release Steve Daheb, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of Blue Coat Systems said, “Application visibility and control is increasingly critical now that typical Web usage consumes over 50 percent of a company’s network, and video and aggressive applications can easily incapacitate business-critical applications.”

“PacketShaper appliances provide full visibility of applications, Web content and Web threats, combined with strong bandwidth and application controls to bring network usage in line with business priorities,” added Daheb.

Company sources explained that the new version adds an intelligent structure to auto-discovered applications and Web content categories thereby making it easy to understand application usage. Also the new software doubles the capacity for managing remote sites using an existing PacketShaper 12000 appliance.

It was revealed that PacketShaper appliances help in seeing and managing Web and non-Web applications, Web content and Web threats.

PacketShaper appliances leverage “classification by URL category” functionality in order to provide instant awareness of Web content. This includes Web threats via integration with the cloud-based Blue Coat WebPulse service.

Also version 8.7 of the PacketShaper operating software features an automated hierarchical grouping of applications and content for easy monitoring and control of social media, business-critical applications, business data, Web threats and other groupings. Besides it also features updated classifications for CIFS, H.323, SSL, Skype (News - Alert), and HTTP.

Officials added that a new version of the Blue Coat IntelligenceCenter central reporting solution for PacketShaper is available now. The IntelligenceCenter 3.2 release enhances interactivity to the real-time dashboard; provides new reports for link and class utilization, network efficiency, VoIP metrics, and trend analysis besides offering the flexibility to define reports by business hours.

Customers can benefit a lot from the PacketShaper 8.7 which is made available as a software upgrade for all customers with a current support contract for a PacketShaper appliance. IntelligenceCenter 3.2 is also available now as a software upgrade along with a current support contract for the IntelligenceCenter software, said company sources.

In other news, Blue Coat Systems announced that new data collected from live deployments shows that Blue Coat CacheFlow 5000 appliances for carrier caching can improve user web experience.According to a release, this data demonstrates that CacheFlow appliances achieve, on average, ten times faster web downloads for video and other Web 2.0 content, which can lead to improved customer satisfaction. Blue Coat has made testing tools available, so that customers evaluating the CacheFlow solution can test end-to-end response time in their own environment to quantify the user experience benefit.