Blue Coat Middle East reports 15 per cent increase in sales

Sales revenue increased 15% year on year, with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) leading the GCC countries in terms of sales revenue, followed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar.

The company's revenue from the Middle East region contributed 5.1 percent to Blue Coat's total worldwide sales, a formidable number given that technology multinationals operating in the area contribute an average of one to two percent to global revenues.

"We continue to be pleased with the market acceptance of the solutions that Blue Coat provides as evidenced by the stronger than expected sequential growth in revenue," said Ray Kafity, general manager Blue Coat Middle East.

"The GCC region will continue to contribute the lion's share of our revenue, now 97 percent, but we see great potential in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt in 2006."

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia ranks first in terms of sales revenue, with a contribution 42 percent, followed by the UAE, contributing 21 percent, then Qatar with 18 percent, Kuwait at 10%, while Oman and Yemen contributed 3 percent respectively, and another 3 percent from the remaining active countries.

"We will continue to focus on expanding our market presence and making appropriate investments in our infrastructure to address the growing market demand across the region," continued Kafity. "Plans are already being rolled out to make sure that partners are well equipped to provide our customers with high end consulting work and support services."

Results showed that the combined Blue Coat Proxy SG and Proxy AV solution attracted the most interest among security professionals. This robust platform quickly and intelligently processes web objects to determine which objects should be scanned for viruses - Proxy AV scans, and Proxy SG caches.

Another area of current and future interest, Blue Coat reports, is Spyware. Blue Coat believes most organizations will run anti-spyware clients on their mobile PC's (laptops), and both ProxySG and Spyware Interceptor can alert administrators when those machines return with spyware infections.

As far as vertical markets are concerned, "all sectors are Internet security hungry but the top four are telecoms, oil and gas, banking and education," he commented.

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 Proxy AV 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.