Blue Coat SG appliances reduce latency and bandwidth at customer sites creating better service, higher retention and lower operational costs Blue Coat(r) Systems (Nasdaq: BCSI), the leader in secure content and application delivery, has announced that Networx Australia, an innovative managed service provider for Australian enterprises and organisations, has selected Blue Coat SG appliances with MACH5 application acceleration technology for Wide Area Network (WAN) optimisation and Web security to its managed service customers.
The SG appliances, located at the Networx operations centre and at customer locations, reduce latency and minimise bandwidth consumption for customers, while also providing Web filtering and security. The resulting service significantly improves network and Internet performance for customers. It also enables Networx to cut its own operational costs and increase customer retention.
"The Internet Service Provider business in Australia is sharply competitive, but with the Blue Coat solution we have been able to differentiate our service through accelerated delivery of content and applications and also offer comprehensive Web filtering," said Mikael Haidar, chief information officer, Networx Australia.
"Blue Coat SG appliances can simultaneously solve application latency issues, reduce bandwidth consumption and deliver security and control.
The result is significantly faster and more reliable service for customers, important differentiation in a competitive market, increased customer retention and lower costs due to bandwidth reductions," added Haidar.
Networx Australia provides WAN and Internet gateway links to its customers over fibre. The WAN links connect customer locations all over Australia and Internet access through a classic hub and spoke architecture from the operations centre. Networx Australia has deployed Blue Coat SG appliances in its operations centre, and they are beginning to deploy them in customer locations. In one deployment linking two customer sites, the use of SG appliances reduced remote Windows login and profile establishment from a 20 minute process to approximately 20 seconds.
The solution also provides a huge increase in file sharing performance,
Web-based applications and some SQL transactions. Using Blue Coat SG appliances, Networx customers have accelerated file transfers of important Excel spread sheets and other files utilising the CIFS protocol up to 200 times faster. FTP file transfers now can run 20 times faster and require less bandwidth.
Networx Australia pays its upstream Internet provider for bandwidth usage. Because they can reduce their bandwidth consumption by as much as 80 percent with the Blue Coat solution, they can significantly reduce their own costs, while offering improved performance to customers. Blue Coat SG appliances provide the improvements through multiple technologies, including bandwidth management, compression and caching content at the operations center or locally at the customer site. These same technologies plus protocol optimisation also reduce application latency.
"Blue Coat SG appliances accelerate applications and content, decrease bandwidth consumption and offer a complete platform for security and control," said Steve Mullaney, vice president of worldwide marketing for Blue Coat Systems. "We're pleased to help Networx Australia increase customer retention while lowering their costs at the same time."
