When did Proxy become Application Delivery?

For those of you that use Blue Coat ProxySG devices as your proxy, you may have noticed the term "Application Delivery Network" appearing on their website. While this may not be a surprise to Blue Coat fans that have been following the Packeteer acquisition, it is a surprise if you've not been that concerned with PacketShaper and have been busily securing your enterprise network.

The term Application Delivery probably isn't that new sounding to most people as it's already been claimed by a number of other companies as well. F5 and Citrix both come to mind as companies that have in recent times used that terminology.

Is Blue Coat all that different or the same as those other vendors? Well, for starters, to us Blue Coat has always been the "proxy" company. F5 and Citrix aren't really known as proxy vendors, and of course here at "The Proxy Update" we have a certain affinity for proxy devices.

Blue Coat's proxy is of course more than just an HTTP proxy, having in recent years added additional protocol support as they added WAN Optimization functionality. Their claim is of course that with WAN Optimization and PacketShaper, they know have more visibility into the application layer, and what's happening with applications across the network, hence the new moniker, "Application Delivery Network". It fits and we can see where they're coming from. The interesting question will be what other companies try to use or fit into this terminology.