Blue Coat restructures, strikes a deal

Blue Coat Systems last week unveiled a restructuring plan and announced its $5.25 million acquisition of S7 Software Solutions, an IT research and development firm based in Bangalore, India.

The combination of the S7 Software acquisition and restructuring program is intended to enable the company to more cost effectively develop new products and pursue new routes to market, Blue Coat says. “Together these actions will allow us to invest for future growth while aligning the company’s cost structure to its current revenue level, which should drive higher and more consistent levels of profitability,” said CFO Gordon Brooks in a statement.

The restructuring plan calls for a 10% workforce reduction; the closure of three small facilities in Latvia, New Jersey and The Netherlands; reorganization of sales and marketing and other departments; shifting engineering positions from Sunnyvale, Calif., and Austin, Texas, to its other locations; and consolidating research and development work at four vertically-focused sites.

In other WAN optimization and application acceleration news:

* Crescendo Networks debuted a new management appliance designed to monitor its application delivery controllers. A unique feature of the AppBeat SC Service Controller is the option to send monitoring notifications and alerts via Twitter if there’s a problem with application delivery or networking, for instance, that IT needs to know about.

* Application management vendor Compuware this week completed its $295 million acquisition of Gomez, which specializes in monitoring and managing Web site and Web application performance. The combined company will be able to provide IT pros with a unified view of application performance across the enterprise and Internet, along with troubleshooting and resolution capabilities, company executives say.

Customer AutoTrader.com is one fan of the union: "We use Compuware to gauge responsiveness from inside our enterprise and Gomez to track performance and availability from our customers' point of view, wherever they are on the Internet. We're excited by the vision of integrating the two,” said Cliff Goolsby, senior director of architecture, engineering and systems assurance.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.