Jon’s Network

iShared, the nifty little WAFS product that Packeteer got when they bought Tacit Networks a couple years back, will likely be dropped by Blue Coat from what I have heard. Blue Coat mentioned that they planned on rejuvenating Packetshaper as a standalone product as well as integrating some Packetshaper technologies into the ProxySG appliances. Nothing was mentioned of iShared, and I doubt anyone asked, unless you count all of the current customers that invested in iShared not because it does byte-level caching better than Riverbed, Blue Coat or Cisco, but because it integrates uniquely into a Microsoft shop, giving them a branch office services in a single box that syncs with headquarters. Riverbed and Cisco have recently announced integration with Microsoft services so this might be a good option for iShared users if Blue Coat forgets about them, but that wouldn’t be good for Blue Coat. Maybe that is why Wedbush Morgan thinks Riverbed may benefit from this Blue Coat acquisition of Packeteer.