SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Blue Coat® Systems (Nasdaq: BCSI), the leader in secure content and application delivery, today announced that Richardson Partners Financial Limited, a firm that specializes in managing the financial affairs of high net worth Canadians and their families, has selected Blue Coat SG appliances to accelerate their full range of business applications in their branch offices. In particular, Richardson Partners Financial Limited uses some applications hosted externally by Application Service Providers and accessed over the Internet using SSL-encrypted communication. Blue Coat SG appliances provide visibility, control and acceleration of SSL traffic between internal users and external applications.

“Enterprises have to take a strategic view to address the acceleration of all distributed applications,” said Andrew McKinney, director of technical services, Richardson Partners Financial Limited. “The fact is many internal and all externally-sourced business-critical applications use SSL communication, so it is imperative for an acceleration solution to speed SSL-encrypted traffic as well as Web, file services and email.”

Applications Run Faster and Consume Less Bandwidth Richardson Partners Financial Limited has seen dramatic reductions of latency, making distributed applications run faster, and in bandwidth consumption, providing more capacity for other applications, such as Voice over IP (VoIP). More importantly, reductions in bandwidth usage enable Richardson Partners Financial to add additional branch offices or users without having to increase the network bandwidth of its Wide Area Network (WAN). Even at the company’s Internet gateway located at its primary data center, the use of caching, filtering and control resulted in a dramatic reduction of bandwidth consumption through use of the Blue Coat SG appliance. The SG appliance also provides Web security and controls over applications and content, such as protecting against malware and controlling Web communication and other applications.

“It was immediately obvious that there was only one WAN optimization solution that could meet all of the needs at Richardson Partners Financial,” said Diane Cook, principle at Softek Excellence Inc., the systems integrator responsible for the deployment. “SSL encrypted traffic represents a significant and growing portion of business critical traffic for Richardson Partners Financial, and only Blue Coat SG appliances could accelerate SSL traffic as well as the other business applications.”

Blue Coat Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BCSI)