Packeteer in a Proxy?

Last month Blue Coat announced intentions to purchase the networking company Packeteer. Today they released an announcement that the deal has been completed. As one of the heavy weight leaders in the proxy market, it led many of us to wonder what is it, that Packeteer can do for a proxy.

For those of you unfamiliar with Packeteer, their main product line is called PacketShaper, a product that classifies data going across the network, and gives the administrator the ability to manage the bandwidth being allocated to different applications. PacketShaper also does some compression and TCP optimization to improve the bandwidth usage of the application.

Blue Coat has called PacketShaper the "crown jewel" they were buying Packeteer for. PacketShaper will definitely give Blue Coat the ability to recognize more applications, and when you recognize more applications, you can probably proxy more applications. In a previous article we talked about proxying applications besides HTTP and HTTPS. With better visibility, you can even start talking about different policies for different HTTP-based applications.

There's no where for the proxy to go, but to get smarter. This is good news for all IT administrators.