'We realized that once we started testing the units that it would be most important to see how they worked with Secure Sockets Layer-encrypted Web sites,' since Richardson data is sent securely, McKinney said. 'The acceleration of that kind of traffic, that's what [Blue Coat's] competitors aren't able to do.'

While other products accelerated traffic, they were application-specific and didn't help on secure, encrypted sites, he said. 'The competitors only allowed acceleration of less than 5% of the traffic, which didn't justify the costs.'

Richardson's IT department chose Blue Coat. Before doing so, it regularly saw Web traffic hit the 5MB bandwidth capacity limit, McKinney said. Today, even with all its applications running on the network, bandwidth demands are down to about 1.5MB a day, which saves money and offers much better performance for users. 'We think there are further improvements to be found,' he said.

The Blue Coat model SG400 and SG800 devices were deployed in February under a phased program, focusing first on bandwidth filtering and caching, said McKinney. Other performance improvements will be added later. So far, the company has found that between a third and half of its network traffic can be cached, he said. The devices provide acceleration, policy control and security for users and allow the company to limit or completely block the use of streaming media by employees.

In the long term, the company plans to buy additional Blue Coat hardware to provide local data caching at its branch offices. That will keep local data from constantly traversing the WAN, boosting network performance even more, McKinney said.