Blue Coat and Packeteer show the future of Internet user and application control

The road show, entitled "Controlling your users and your applications," kicked off in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on February Saturday 12th and continued to Khobar on the 13th, Doha on the 14th, and Kuwait City on the 15th, followed in Dubai on the 16th and ends in Cairo on February 20th.

"Our road show has already attracted forward thinking business people across the region - those who are acutely aware of how important it is to have complete visibility into networked application performance, and then control and accelerate the applications, reducing costs and increasing performance. These are the services we provide, as the dominant vendor in the WAN bandwidth market in the Middle East," says Packeteer's Marketing Director for Europe, Middle East and Africa, Roger Hockaday.

Packeteer sees the international WAN optimization market - including compression technologies quality-of-service capabilities and monitoring - rising to a value of $427 million by 2008.

In the Middle East, the company is seeing strong growth in WAN optimization at both enterprise and service provider levels, from those looking to protect their applications, strengthen their network security, improve their quality of service and enable the IT function to operate more efficiently.

Blue Coat is using the road show as an opportunity to highlight the increasing sophistication of security threats, and its constantly evolving state-of-the-art technologies which effectively combat these threats.

One such example is a new set of URL filtering categories, which allows gateway spyware prevention through applying new policy to inbound spyware installs and outbound spyware communications.

Ray Kafity, Blue Coat Middle East's General Manager, says: "Anyone surfing the Internet can fall prey to spyware. To completely block all known sources of spyware would lead to a severe restriction on web use, so Blue Coat is proactively addressing this problem by bolstering its existing anti-spyware solution with two separate URL filtering categories - one for applying policy controls to known spyware sources and one for applying policy controls to known destinations where spyware attempts to 'phone home.'"

"This enables organisations to apply policy controls that could limit inbound spyware traffic without completely blocking access to sites that may have spyware advertising, while also blocking outbound spyware communications," Kafity added.