Blue Coat adds Twitter to PacketShaper

SUNNYVALE, USA: Blue Coat Systems, Inc., a provider of Application Delivery Networking services, today announced that it has added Twitter to the applications that Blue Coat PacketShaper appliances can discover, monitor and control.

With the ability to identify more than 600 applications, PacketShaper appliances enable enterprises to gain a comprehensive understanding of how employees utilize social networking tools and set policies to manage them, said a press release.

“Understanding which social media tools are being utilized and how employees are using them is valuable information that helps network administrators set and enforce corporate policies,” said Steve House, director, Product Marketing at Blue Coat Systems.

He added that the Blue Coat PacketShaper appliances provide the visibility, actionable intelligence and control that enable enterprises to fully realize the value of their network investments.

According to statistics from Nielsen NetView, there were seven million unique visitors to Twitter in February 2009, an increase of 1,374 percent from February 2008.

This increase is consistent with continued growth in enterprise adoption of social networking tools. According to a survey by Awareness, 75 percent of employees were already using social networking sites for business purposes in 2008, an increase of 15 percent from 2007.

The same survey also found that 61 per cent of businesses use social networking to improve communication and collaboration.

Using Blue Coat PacketShaper appliances, enterprises have the ability to see and control Twitter, which allows them to set appropriate IT policies to either enable or control collaboration. PacketShaper appliances can identify and classify more than 600 applications and can monitor more than 100 metrics per application session, said the release.

This in-depth visibility enables network managers to limit the impact of recreational applications and optimize the performance of business applications by applying granular controls such as bandwidth guarantees, limits, prioritization and other quality of service mechanisms.

With the visibility provided by PacketShaper appliances, network managers can set and enforce corporate IT policies to optimize and accelerate business applications and block or limit non-business applications.

Blue Coat offers unmatched visibility into the performance and security of applications running across the network, providing enterprises with the control they need to contain costs, enhance business productivity and quickly respond to changing business requirements, the release added.