Dubai-15 November  2007: Blue Coat Systems, Inc. , a leader in WAN Application Delivery and Secure Web Gateway, today announced new results based on performance and security testing of Blue Coat® ProxySG® appliances conducted at SAP's Enterprise Services Community Networking Lab (ENL). The ENL testing consisted of an enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA)-based business application landscape and results demonstrated that Blue Coat ProxySG appliances can decrease response times for remote users of SAP® applications by up to 9,700 percent while reducing the bandwidth consumption by up to 99 percent.

ProxySG appliances can also monitor and accelerate SSL-encrypted SAP solution-based sessions end-to-end from the application server to an end-users browser without ever transmitting clear text over any network lines. ProxySG appliances maintain the security of the sessions, while still producing end-to-end network acceleration.

The SAP performance baseline for downloading a 5MB knowledge management file across a local area network (LAN) can be as speedy as one second in local data center networks; however, in tests at simulating branch offices using a wide area network (WAN), response time may be substantially slower. For example, at a distant branch office connected to a data center over a T3 (45 megabits per second) WAN link with a round-trip latency of 300 milliseconds and 1% network packet loss, a 5 MB file required 138 seconds to download. Using a ProxySG appliance, the response time from the data center to the branch dropped to as low as 2 seconds for such downloads under these WAN conditions.

"SAP business applications are mission-critical for local as well as remote branch users," Nidal Taha, Blue Coat Systems Middle East Regional Director. "Blue Coat ProxySG appliances can accelerate networks for delivery of SAP applications to branch offices, even if the session is SSL-encrypted."

"The Enterprise Services Community launched the ENL, a pilot lab for the new SAP Co-Innovation Lab[1], in an effort to prove and demonstrate the great benefits of the latest networking techniques," said Joerg Nalik, Ph.D., director, Partner Solution Management, SAP Labs. "As business processes and organizations become ever more globally distributed, application delivery and WAN optimization become areas of increasing importance. Blue Coat ProxySG delivers significant wide area network acceleration for the SAP applications and can do so by maintaining traffic encryption end-to-end from clients all the way to the application servers.

[1] The SAP Co-Innovation Lab builds on a successful pilot of a co-innovation facility - the ENL - for network vendors. The goal of the pilot facility was to give leading network vendors hands-on experience testing their products and services together with SAP applications, while SAP explored ways to optimize the network performance for its enterprise SOA offerings. By expanding the concept to all infrastructure and application technology vendors in the hands-on SAP Co-Innovation Lab, customers will benefit from reduced application and infrastructure integration costs and faster innovation cycles.

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About Blue Coat Systems:
Blue Coat secures Web communications and accelerates business applications across the distributed enterprise. Blue Coat's family of appliances and client-based solutions - deployed in branch offices, Internet gateways, end points, and data centers - provide intelligent points of policy-based control enabling IT organizations to optimize security and accelerate performance between users and applications. Blue Coat has installed more than 30,000 appliances worldwide and is ranked #1 by IDC in the Secure Content and Application Delivery market. Blue Coat is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and can be reached at (408) 220-2200 or www.bluecoat.com

Note:
All trademarks, trade names or service marks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.

For more information, please contact:
Manal Abi Rafeh
Marketing and Channel Account Manager
Dubai Internet City, Cannon building 9, office 313
P.O. Box 72377, Dubai - UAE
Tel: (971-4) 391-1620
FAX: (971-4) 391-1635
E-mail: manal.abirafeh@bluecoat.com
Website: www.blucoat.com

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© Press Release 2007