Blue Coat and Packeteer to launch regional road show

Consisting primarily of hardware vendor solutions that use compression, quality-of-service (QOS) capabilities and, increasingly, monitoring, this market has a future that looks bright given that the international WAN optimization market will increase from $236 million in 2004 to $427 million in 2008.

In parallel, security threats continue to proliferate and threats are coming from within and without the business. Spyware, adware, phishing, keyloggers, dialers and browser hijackers are some of the fastest growing threats on the Internet today. Simply browsing a Web page can place a user and the organization in jeopardy of being the next host of one these attacks. Spyware can either be deployed with or without the consent of the user. Malicious Spyware deployments, however, occur without the user's knowledge and can be used for more destructive purposes such as obtaining user passwords and extracting other confidential information from corporate PCs.

To address such issues, Blue Coat Systems Middle East, a leading Web security company, and Packeteer, Inc., the pioneer and global leader in WAN Application Traffic Management, have announced their intention to embark on a six day region wide road show entitled "Control your users and your applications" targeting technology and business decision makers. The road show will kick off in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on February 12th, traveling through Khobar on the 13th, Doha on the 14th, Kuwait on the 15th, Dubai on the 16th and ending in Cairo on the 20th.

Packeteer has been and continues to be the major dominant vendor in the WAN bandwidth market in the Middle East market.

"As part of Packeteer's commitment to emerging markets and its appreciation for the potential of the Middle Eastern market, we have decided to take part in this road show in order to reach our potential users. WAN optimization is seeing strong growth in the market from Middle East enterprise and service providers that are looking to protect their applications, strengthen their network security, improve their quality of service and enable the IT to operate more efficiently" said Roger Hockaday - Packeteer Marketing Director for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. "Organizations are looking more closely at WAN optimization vendors that provide sophisticated compression and traffic-shaping capabilities to improve utilization, reduce bandwidth costs and increase application performance."

"Risks and threats to the organization are taking new shape. Now more than ever, they originate from inside the network. Establishing a security solution to address the appropriateness of content and its usage within electronic communications has quickly become a legitimate business issue, due in part to productivity, liability, and privacy concerns. A separate solution focused on user and content control, ideally based on an appliance platform and a proxy architecture, will be warranted for most organizations," commented Nidal Taha, Blue Coat Middle East Technical Director. "This road show is aimed at providing leading ISPs and enterprise with a comprehensive solution which optimizes its WAN investment by increasing bandwidth and user productivity while at the same time controlling the organization's interaction with the Internet and reducing the risks of internal and external malicious threats."