"The big news for us this week is the major new version of PacketShaper," said Dave Hewitt, product marketing manager for EMEA. "Blue Coat's vision is to provide visibility (to see and control what is gong on in network); acceleration technology (to boost performance of business applications); and doing all this in a protected against against malicious content."

"The user interface of version 8.5 has been radically redesigned," said Hewitt. "We have raised the view into a single, unified workspace that allows IT administrators to see real time graphs and performance metrics for every application on the network."

"It is not overstating it to say that PacketShaper can now see hundreds of different applications, and is even able to see inside difficult applications such as Oracle or Skype," he told Techworld.

Back in June, Blue Coat released a software plug-in that allowed its PacketShaper appliances to , the online music service that is swallowing large amount of enterprise bandwidth (rougjhly 256kbit/s per user).

"The other important element to this release is its ability to see more," said Hewitt. "Currently PacketShaper see on average 650 types of applications, but this has been added to in this release, with visibility for about a dozen new applications."