Blue Coat Adds Video To WAN Optimization Offering

Blue Coat Systems this week detailed its approach to optimizing the delivery of live streaming video and video on demand across wide area networks.

While the focus on application performance optimization (APO) thus far has been mainly on securing and optimizing the performance of more traditional apps, the growth of video-based content has brought multimedia into the realm of APO.Blue Coat announced it has developed a software interface and a partner initiative to integrate its WAN-optimization technologies with video produced using solutions from enterprise video vendors. Blue Coat systems manage video delivery by accelerating business-designated video, limiting the impact of non-business video and prohibiting unacceptable video delivery--based on enterprise-defined policies.

For approved on-demand video, Blue Coat appliances cache video locally at each branch office. Corporate-made, on-demand video can be "pre-populated"--including being uploaded during off-hours--to minimize bandwidth use. The Blue Coat interface lets admins easily manage video content on the network, including the ability to "recall" a video with a single click.

For live streaming video, Blue Coat's stream-splitting technology "multicasts" a single video stream across the WAN to a branch office, then splits it locally to deliver it to individual desktops.

Initial participants in Blue Coat's partner initiative include Media Publisher and Jubilant Technologies.