The SG Client software will be a modular offering from the Sunnyvale, California-based caching, security and app performance management developer, with each module licensed separately, said Nigel Hawthorn, its VP of international marketing.
Its five modules are Access, Accelerate, Filter, Secure and Monitor. Access and Secure are in fact two facets of the company’s Remote Access (Blue Coat RA) client launched last month, while Filter comes from K9, its free, downloadable URL filtering product for the consumer market.
Accelerate and Monitor are thus the new elements and come from the MACH5 optimization/acceleration portfolio unveiled at the beginning of this year, Hawthorn explained. Some of the acceleration techniques will be relevant as soon as the laptop connects to a corporate network, such as compression on the fly, he began. This technology used to be too processor-intensive to put on a laptop, but technical advances have now made it possible.
Other techniques, such as object caching on the laptop, are only relevant from the second time the object is requested. Byte caching, on the other hand, can start sooner.
The SG Client, like Blue Coat RA, is the result of the developer’s acquisition of Permeo Technologies in January. The protocols it can address are TCP, FTP, CIFS, MAPI, HTTP and HTTPS, the last of these being possible because it can decrypt the text to inspect it.
The product will go on general availability in January 2007, at which point the company will announce exact pricing. The pricing model, however, will be on a per-user, per-module basis. Existing users of Blue Coat RA will be able to upgrade to the full SG Client, and the latter will also be able to talk to the company’s ProxySG servers back in the corporate data center, Hawthorn went on.
