After the caching market took a dive, CacheFlow decided to become an Internet security gateway company. It changed its name to Blue Coat Systems last summer, and from what I could tell it made a pretty smooth transition.

A report by IDC confirms my suspicions. According to the Worldwide Secure Content Management Forecast Update and Competitive Vendor Shares, 2002-2007, Blue Coat ranks No. 1 in revenue. IDC says Blue Coat has 33% of the market for secure content management appliances.

Guess that just goes to show that caching technology can play an important role in securing your network. Blue Coat partners with companies like Trend Micro, Symantec and Secure Computing to help turn its core caching technology into secure gateway appliances. In addition, the appliances include policy engines that enable users to tightly control how content is secured and delivered.

Blue Coat customers include companies such as Coca-Cola, Discover and ABN-Amro.

Ryan Beck & Co., a financial services firm in New Jersey, has deployed Blue Coat appliances to manage and secure Web content and bandwidth for hundreds of users in dozens of offices. The Blue Coat appliances replaced Microsoft software-based proxy servers, but still link into Ryan Beck's Microsoft Active Directory. That means network administrators can control what content is viewed based on user access rights.

Len Favata, senior vice president and director of information services for Ryan Beck, says the Blue Coat appliances allow the filtering of Web content based on user groups "without impacting performance the way our software proxies did."

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.