Blue Coat Middle East launches ProxyAV to boost revenues

The Dubai Internet City based company also announced that its first half revenues for 2004 have grown 25% over the same period last year.

At a meeting held in Dubai last March, senior Blue Coat executives set an aggressive business plan to meet market demand and customer requirements, and the launch of ProxyAV will energize these activities.

"We agreed that the Middle East technology market is riding high and will continue to gather momentum in the medium term," said Ray Kafity, Blue Coat Middle East general manager. "So we put together a strategic plan to double our market share by the end of 2004 by investing heavily in our Middle East operations and channel, and focusing on high growth economic sectors such as the financial sector and oil and gas."

Gateway Web anti-virus is not widely deployed in organizations today due to inadequate throughput and latency experienced with existing products. When a Web anti-virus solution is installed that slows down response times for browser-based traffic, IT staff are faced with the challenge of compromising between the performance users demand, and the security required by the business. This has been the situation with Web anti-virus, which unfortunately has created open back doors in the security infrastructure that have allowed Web-based viruses to infect enterprise systems. These open back doors include employee use of Web-based personal email and Internet file downloads.

"Blue Coat now enables organizations to deploy Web anti-virus with scalable, high-performance options designed to meet the "real-time" requirements of Web traffic. The ProxyAV works in concert with Blue Coat's ProxySG platform, which quickly and intelligently processes Web objects to determine which objects should be scanned for viruses," said Ray Kafity, Blue Coat Middle East general manager. "Web objects are then sent to the ProxyAV appliance where they are quickly scanned for viruses, and sent back to the ProxySG where they can be cached. This integrated approach delivers

Web traffic throughput of up to 249 Mbps with only 4 milliseconds average latency, based on internal tests simulating "real-world" Web traffic loads."

Blue Coat Middle East will launch a region-wide road show in the third quarter of this year to demonstrate the product to large enterprises.

According to IDC Security Products' Vice President Chris Christiansen, "In many cases, performance issues interfere with customers' plans to install Web traffic virus protection that complements existing email and desktop anti-virus installations. Blue Coat developed an innovative approach to solving the Web anti-virus performance problem by combining a proxy appliance, known for Web control and performance, with a dedicated anti-virus appliance optimized for scanning Web objects."

Blue Coat offers customers the flexibility to choose among industry-leading anti-virus engines, including McAfee, Panda, Sophos and Trend Micro, each providing customers with automated updates. This flexibility of the ProxyAV allows customers to implement a layered anti-virus defense across the distributed enterprise, where a different anti-virus engine can be deployed at the Web gateway to complement email servers and desktops.