The company says value-added resellers and consultants can deploy a PacketShaper appliance in the network of a customer or prospective customer in 30 minutes or less and then, at the conclusion of a data collection period, typically seven days, use the cloud service to perform the analysis of the network traffic.
The assessment from PacketShaper appliances can reveal surprising details about how a company’s Wide Area Network (WAN) and Internet connections are used. One partner, Carl Sockwell from Logista Solutions remarked, “I can finally see what I was supposed to know already,” after performing an assessment. Reports from the Blue Coat Assessment Service provide critical visibility into:
Root causes of poor application performance
Bandwidth consumed by recreational or non-business applications and the performance impact on business-critical applications
Causes of peak or “bursty” bandwidth consumption and its effects on other traffic
Amount of bulk application traffic that would benefit from WAN optimisation
Use and prevalence of social media applications
Network traffic and utilization patterns
“The new Blue Coat Assessment Service brings application delivery network assessments within easy reach of enterprises and organizations and opens up a revealing level of detail where there had previously been a severe lack of knowledge,” said Steve House, senior director, visibility solutions, Blue Coat Systems. “By offering the Blue Coat Assessment Service to prospective customers, VARs and consultants can quickly deliver a valuable report and reinforce their role as their customers’ trusted networking experts.”
The Blue Coat Assessment Service enables remote application delivery assessments, with all analysis of customer traffic and application patterns taking place in the cloud. The partner receives a detailed, twelve-page report including colour graphs and “smart” content that partners can augment with their own insights and brand with their own logo and contact information.