New WAN optimisation capability reduces video impact

Blue Coat recently announced it has added the ability to scale and optimise encrypted Adobe Flash video, in addition to the video delivery capabilities already integrated with Blue Coat MACH5 WAN optimisation appliances. The MACH5 solution includes a combination of stream-splitting, pre-population and advanced video caching technologies to scale the use of live or on-demand internal company video, as well as external web video, with minimal network impact. This prevents video from saturating a company's Wide Area Network (WAN) or internet gateway while making video available to employees throughout the company – without crippling the performance of other business critical applications."Most companies want to significantly increase their use of internal video for training and communication but are limited by the capacity constraints of their existing WAN links to branch offices," Blue Coat Australia and New Zealand, managing director, Bruce Bennie says. "Blue Coat removes most of the network impact associated with video by fully integrating video optimisation with our MACH5 WAN optimisation solution to accelerate a full range of business traffic, including Web, cloud and video applications. With the new capability, 100 users watching a video will only have the same impact on the network as one user."Rather than a third-party add-on, the video optimisation capabilities provided by the MACH5 solution are an integral part of its architecture and scale to support large numbers of users. In addition, video optimisation can be conducted simultaneously with acceleration of enterprise applications, such as SharePoint or SAP.Blue Coat video optimisation already includes the ability to optimise Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, HTML5, QuickTime and Microsoft Windows Media. The addition of optimisation for RTMPe and RTMPte encrypted Flash expands the MACH5 capabilities to optimise video used by providers for maintaining end-user digital rights management (DRM). This is especially critical as enterprises leverage cloud-delivered video services for news and analysis related to their industries.The MACH5 WAN optimisation solution accelerates remote branch office access to files, email, storage and enterprise applications as well as Web, cloud and video applications.