Why do I think Cisco a better choice over Blue Coat?
Being asked why I would take Cisco over Blue Coat in a choice of vendors and products has led me to the following reasons. I would hope that the marketing teams of both companies who take so much time out of their days posting to other blogs would take the same amount of time to post to this blog. We invite them to reply to this blog and shine some light on their products. (Disclosure: Pluto Networks is a Cisco Reseller for VoIP, but not the WAAS)
Five Reasons I Pick Cisco over Blue Coat
1) Cisco WAAS has a larger installed base and many of BlueCoat's ProxySG sales are clearly for secure web gateway--which is a different functionality--and not necessarily for WAN optimization.
2) Blue Coat's user manual warns of data loss issues - That observation is spooky all by itself, especially given the unknown true size of Blue Coat's customer base (they won't tell anyone how many customers are really using WAN optimization). While Cisco WAAS has a number of performance and scaling issues, at least data loss and data corruption isn't one that I've heard very much about.
3) Blue Coat ProxySG is harder to configure and deploy - The user manual for their ProxySG product is more than 3000 pages long. That can't be an easy product to configure. For a small limited-scale deployment, I'm looking for as simple a product as possible.
4) Cisco WAAS offers disk encryption while Blue Coat does not - Somehow, having my credit card numbers stored in the clear on hot-swappable disk drives just does not make me comfortable.
5) Cisco gives bigger discounts for WAAS - It's well-known that Cisco can and does subsidize their WAAS product line. Since Blue Coat is a smaller company, they probably can't subsidize WAN optimization as much from their other business revenues. You can even get WAAS at below the hardware cost if you really know how to pressure Cisco. In the possible event that the deployment goes bad, the financial investment you made is minimal.
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