The CloudCaching Engine, an advanced asymmetric acceleration technology, breaks the barrier that has prevented traditional WAN optimization solutions from optimizing most applications based in the public cloud. The CloudCaching Engine enables businesses to more readily adopt cloud infrastructure to achieve operational savings. Through efficient use of the cloud, companies can also meet the increasingly complex challenges of evolving communication and collaboration and enhance business processes for the distributed enterprise.

Traditional WAN optimization solutions are designed to accelerate file and email traffic using a symmetric deployment of physical or virtual appliances in the branch office and data center. For those private cloud deployments, Blue Coat provides its Cloud Mach5 Virtual Appliance since a private cloud data center can accommodate a WAN optimization device symmetrically aligned with an appliance at the company's office. In a true public cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment, the infrastructure is not owned or managed by the customer, so it is not possible to co-locate a WAN optimization solution in such a cloud environment. This means cloud applications cannot be accelerated to users using traditional WAN optimization between two points. Blue Coat uniquely solves this problem by using its CloudCaching Engine to extend WAN optimization for acceleration of cloud-based applications, including those using video, Web-based interfaces and IPv6 content.

"Already a majority of companies (52.3%) use SaaS, and the average number of SaaS applications per company is climbing sharply, from fewer than two last year to more than five this year," said John Burke, principal research analyst, Nemertes Research.

"As more companies seek to deliver more applications to their users via SaaS, application delivery optimization (ADO) that can improve the performance and reliability of access to those applications--without requiring access to the providers' infrastructure--will become steadily more important, as well," he added.

Blue Coat's Public Cloud Optimization solution includes the following key components:

Cloud Caching Engine for Improved Performance of Cloud-based Applications - The Blue Coat CloudCaching Engine is an advanced acceleration technology that enables asymmetric or "one-sided" optimization of public cloud-based applications. With the CloudCaching Engine, businesses can accelerate content and applications from the public cloud without having an appliance located in the cloud data center hosting that particular application.

The CloudCaching Engine leverages new developments for Blue Coat's pioneering content caching specifically designed to accelerate and optimize new Web applications, large video files and dynamic Web 2.0 content. In addition, the Blue Coat solution can accelerate SSL-encrypted traffic even without control of the authentication certificates from the public cloud service which would otherwise make it impossible to accelerate.

Optimization for Cloud delivered Microsoft SharePoint, and other cloud-based applications and services speeds response time and decrease bandwidth consumption. The CloudCaching Engine helps deliver an average of 40x acceleration for Microsoft SharePoint BPOS - without requiring appliances or virtual appliances on Microsoft cloud infrastructure; for cloud delivered video applications, Blue Coat can deliver an increase in over 500x bandwidth capacity for on demand video - all without dedicated devices on cloud provider's infrastructure.

Optimized Video Delivery for Scaling Video and Preventing Floods - as an integrated part of Blue Coat appliances, companies can prevent video floods from overtaking mission-critical applications while, at the same time, scaling the use of internal and Web video across the distributed enterprise. With the ability to cache native on-demand Adobe Flash video using the RTMP protocol, users can get a high quality video experience without consuming WAN or Internet gateway bandwidth beyond that required to serve the first viewer. The Flash caching capability was developed in collaboration with Adobe. Blue Coat WAN optimization solutions can also locally cache on-demand Web-delivered HTML5 and Microsoft Silverlight video content and can perform stream-splitting on live video, so that a single stream of video can serve hundreds of viewers in a single location.

Access and Accelerate IPv4 and IPv6 Content and Applications - Blue Coat solutions provide the industry's first WAN optimization capabilities over IPv6 networks and provide addressing gateway services that automatically and transparently bridge users, content and applications between IPv4 and IPv6 environments. This unique capability solves critical access and performance problems at the application level, since traditional WAN optimization technologies available from other vendors break when applied to IPv6 content and applications.

New Virtual Mach5 WAN Optimization Appliance for Private Clouds - Blue Coat is also introducing a high capacity version of its virtual appliance for large private cloud data centers that can use symmetric optimization. This new Mach5 Cloud Virtual Appliance scales to 45 megabits per second (Mbps) for private cloud and Infrastructure-as-a-Service installation.

"WAN optimization is an important and proven technology for data center consolidation, but companies need a new generation of WAN optimization to address the proliferation of video, Web content and cloud-based services that are fundamentally changing how businesses use and access applications," said Nigel Hawthorn, VP EMEA Marketing at Blue Coat.

"By breaking the long standing barrier that has prevented cloud-based applications from being optimized, Blue Coat is defining a new generation of WAN optimization that will allow businesses to change how they do business," added Hawthorn.

Blue Coat Mach5 appliances for WAN optimization, including optimization and acceleration for public cloud content and applications are available immediately.