Blue Coat Systems this week announced a tool designed to open the lines of communication between its home-grown ProxySG appliances and the PacketShaper gear gained in its $268 million acquisition of Packeteer earlier this year.

The new software plug-in will allow PacketShaper to see deeper into traffic that has been optimized by ProxySG appliances. For instance, PacketShaper appliances can differentiate internal applications from Internet traffic, or differentiate between back-up and real-time traffic, and give priority to applications such as voice.

This integration is different from typical scenarios: PacketShaper appliances can only see a single block of undifferentiated traffic from all other WAN optimization appliances, and it’s not possible to do further classification or QoS on such a block, Blue Coat says. But the new software plug-in BlueCoat developed lets PacketShaper appliances understand traffic from ProxySG appliances using its classification abilities and then apply QoS to it.

“Instead of seeing one big chunk of traffic -- which is common with acceleration devices -- we can break down all the component parts of it so that a PacketShaper maintains visibility into all the applications running, optimized, through a ProxySG,” says Mark Urban, senior director of product marketing at Blue Coat.

The two kinds of gear excel at different application optimization tasks: ProxySG appliances provide WAN optimization and Web security to accelerate business-critical applications, curb recreational traffic and stop malicious content. PacketShaper appliances specialize in the classification of non-Web applications as well as provide QoS or traffic shaping. Used together, the devices give customers greater visibility into and control of their applications, Urban says.

“The combination of the two provides a very broad set of capabilities that really address every major application delivery issue over a distributed network,” he says.

The new software plug-in is available at no charge to PacketShaper customers with a current maintenance agreement. It’s a precursor to greater integration between the two Blue Coat appliances -- which likely will someday be combined in a single form factor. “This is great progress, but it foreshadows that integrated, single platform that will come sometime next year,” Urban says.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.