Redline Networks recently reported that Microsoft late last year installed the Redline E/X 3250 application processor in its corporate net in Redmond, Wash., and now Microsoft is seeing a 50% improvement in performance.

Microsoft installed the appliance to improve the speed with which its business partners access its site to obtain sales leads and manage partnership opportunities, Redline says. The Microsoft site uses a Web version of Siebel Systems 6.0 CRM software to communicate with partners. This portal is accessed by the company’s partners all over the world, and Microsoft officials say they were looking to boost performance for end users regardless of their location.

“Since the application software wasn’t our own, we had to find an approach other than speeding up the application itself,” Becka Johnson, Microsoft senior manager of enterprise systems operations, said in a Redline statement. Microsoft installed the Redline unit in front of the Siebel application and experienced immediate results.

The E/X 3250 appliance was able to serve up dynamic content from Microsoft Web sites and offload the Secure Sockets Layer function from the Web server, Johnson explained. Redline says its appliance was able to deliver 3-to-1 overall compression, which enabled faster downloads for home office users and freed up more bandwidth for applications other than Siebel.

The E/X 3250 accelerator sits on a corporate LAN in front of Web servers, coordinating Web sessions between end users and the servers. By customizing traffic for the type of Web browser being used and multiplexing sessions to the Web servers, Redline says the product can reduce response times and enable servers to handle up to five times as much traffic. E/X 3250 is designed to convert HTTP traffic into Secure HTTP, making it possible to secure a site via encryption without having to recode server content.

Redline, which competes with vendors such as NetScaler and Packeteer, says the E/X 3250 accelerator includes features for authenticating users through Windows NT LAN Manager, and denying machines that lack certificates from trusted certificate authorities. Another feature is called protocol scrubbing, where the device detects and corrects HTTP packet abnormalities, shielding Web servers from potential attacks that the abnormal packets might contain.

The E/X 3250 costs about $30,000 and is generally available.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.