* Blue Coat leads with new software client for mobile workers
About five years ago, I started asking IT managers how end-user demand regarding application and network performance was changing. Three factors were intersecting at once, and they definitely were going to affect employee productivity and IT staffing requirements.
What were these factors?
1. More and more people were working remotely, and thus needed a robust network to access their remote applications.
2. Companies were centralizing their applications in the data center.
3. Network access and WANs were becoming increasingly fast.
Over time, I’ve found that end-user expectations are drastically changing. As network access speeds increase, and more people need to access central applications from remote sites, they expect fast performance – regardless of their location. Their expectation of application response time is only slightly less if they’re at a home office vs. the headquarters, or at an airport lounge vs. a branch office.
What’s the result for IT staffs? They’re taking more trouble calls even when network access and application response time is fairly reasonable. They’re pressured to deliver faster, better, and with less hassle – even for mobile workers.
That’s one reason a lot of IT folks are asking when the optimization vendors will offer a software client to deliver policy-based optimization, as well as authentication and access control.
Blue Coat Systems recently rolled out a software client for this purpose. Packeteer also has a client acceleration tool (via its Tacit acquisition). Competitors, including Cisco, Juniper, and Riverbed, all said they would be coming out with their solutions sometime in second half of 2007.
Blue Coat’s SG Client basically extends the functionality of the optimization appliance to a specific mobile user – or to a very small branch office with just a few employees. Once offices have more than about five employees in them, it’s more economical to use the appliance. The capabilities include acceleration of files or applications, client-side object caching and compression, protocol optimization for CIFS and TCP. Moving forward, Blue Coat will add security, policy control, and performance monitoring, among other capabilities.
I expect the optimization-vendor pack to follow quickly with client-versions of their optimization products. Hats off to Blue Coat for being nimble enough to quickly respond to this growing customer demand.
