Earlier this week I wrote about Converged Access, which unveiled its version of an all-in-one branch office device. Another vendor shooting for unified branch office gear is Packeteer, which just unveiled its new iShaper appliance.

The iShaper bundles application acceleration and QoS capabilities with network performance troubleshooting tools, security services and native Microsoft application services.

By combining multiple functions on a single device, Packeteer is reducing the number of appliances companies have to purchase, deploy and manage, says Mark Urban, director of product marketing at the company. The iShaper is designed to optimize data, voice and video traffic while helping customers’ in their efforts to centralize data and storage and consolidate branch office server infrastructure, he says.

“It unifies all the capabilities that we see to deliver the full spectrum of applications to the branch office in a single package -- monitoring, shaping and acceleration as well as a full set of Microsoft services,” Urban says. “Our goal and focus here was to bring the next level of infrastructure consolidation to the branch office.”

The iShaper can discover more than 600 applications and protocols as well as keep tabs on their performance and apply optimization techniques for specific applications. Acceleration features let companies prioritize and accelerate Common Internet File System (CIFS), FTP, TCP and HTTP-based applications. In addition, the iShaper can apply compression for transactional traffic and disk-based byte caching for data intensive bulk applications to reduce network traffic.

On the voice front, iShaper can monitor the quality of voice calls and make use of traffic reduction techniques to increase network capacity. For video traffic, iShaper can monitor the quality of video conferencing applications as well as identify and separate recreational video from business conferencing so key business-related applications don’t suffer.

Bundled Microsoft services include Windows Server, Internet Security and Acceleration Server and System Management Server.

“We saw customers wanted us to not only consolidate our own technologies, but also find a new way to deliver things like the services provided by all those Microsoft servers at the branch office,” Urban says. “That’s really what the iShaper is about: the best of WAN optimization, WAN visibility, as well as that rich set of Microsoft services all on one platform.”

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.