The announcement also marks Blue Coat’s re-entry into the carrier market if you consider its previous existence as caching technology vendor CacheFlow. The name change came in 2002 and underscored the Sunnyvale, California-based vendor’s shift in focus from caching, which was sold to companies running content-delivery networks, to security, which enabled it to address the enterprise space.
Now the company is actually morphing back into CacheFlow to some extent. It has been adding optimization/acceleration functionality to its proxies, pitching them again as solutions to the challenges of delivering content (now restated as apps) rather than just securing data and networks, and now it has also returned to the carrier market, having formed a service provider business unit in November last year.
Blue Coat said it will deploy both its ProxySG and ProxyAV devices at Vodafone’s 28 properties around the world to prevent minors from receiving pornography on internet-enabled mobile phones.
However, there is also the potential for the deal with the Newbury, UK-based mobile carrier to go further. Today it’s a security play, but there is a generic trend towards data center consolidation, so our MACH5 technology [the optimization/acceleration capabilities on the proxies] could also be relevant, particularly if communications are inter-company, where we can accelerate HTTPS traffic, which our competitors can only pass through without optimization, said Craig Hicks-Frazer, worldwide VP for service providers at Blue Coat.
He said that whereas other vendors like Packeteer, Peribit (now part of Juniper), and Riverbed forward encrypted traffic untouched, we decrypt it, optimize the object and then re-encrypt, which is of increasing relevance as apps like SAP go web-enabled and use HTTPS to communicate with remote users.
Vodafone is not actually the first carrier into which Blue Coat has sold, though it is the first mobile operator on its customer list. Even before the service provider group was formed, its proxies were in use at France Telecom’s Equant division, which is responsible for international WAN services to corporate customers. To date, it has been Equant’s use of rival optimization/acceleration vendor Packeteer’s technology that has gained most attention in the technical press, underscoring as it does the network operator’s Application SLA offering. However, Hicks-Frazer revealed that Equant also uses Blue Coat products as the basis of a managed service offering for both outbound and reverse proxy.
He said Blue Coat will target four areas within the service provider market: mobile, of which Vodafone is the first example; ISP; managed service provider; and hosting provider. He said Blue Coat’s ability to handle HTTPS is particularly relevant in MSP as it will give them the opportunity to differentiate themselves. Hosting will be a further stage of service but with the same perceived benefits.
For ISPs, he said the proposition will be to facilitate filtering services for SMBs by using Blue Coat proxies in the core of the provider’s network, then put up a portal for the SMB to manage it own filtering policy. He said Blue Coat’s partnership with UK-based Barefruit Ltd, which provides alternative relevant sites when an internet user has typed in an incorrect or disused URL, is also designed to appeal to ISPs since they will be sharing the resulting revenue from any clicks through.
