United Arab Shipping Company Reduces Bandwidth Costs by 70 Percent with Blue Coat Appliances

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Blue Coat Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BCSI), the technology leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced that United Arab Shipping Company (UASC), the Middle East’s largest shipping line, has selected Blue Coat® ProxySG® appliances to optimize and secure the delivery of applications and content between the company’s four data centers. By optimizing bandwidth utilization between data centers, UASC reduced its bandwidth costs by 70 percent, and expects to save as much as US$ 250,000 in 2010.

As the 14th largest shipping line in the world, UASC requires significant bandwidth to run the company’s core applications, such as email, data recovery solutions and TRUST, a shipping-specific application.  UASC has 28 branch offices worldwide that access these applications from four data centers in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The high cost of bandwidth in the Middle East limits the ability of UASC to increase its bandwidth to solve application performance issues. 

“High bandwidth costs forced us to find another solution that would allow us to optimally utilize our existing bandwidth, accelerate our business-critical applications and data transfers, and at the same time provide a sophisticated level of policy control and security,” said Mr. Ashraf Jamal, IT network and security manager for UASC.  “Among all the vendors we evaluated, Blue Coat scored the highest on each of the above parameters and provided a single transparent reporting module that could simplify our business processes.”

Using Blue Coat ProxySG appliances, USAC improved the performance of its Global Reporting System, and reduced the time it takes to produce a report from 16 minutes to two minutes.  Not only did this increase in performance improve employee productivity, it also resulted in cost savings.
 
“For many companies like UASC, throwing bandwidth at application performance issues is not a feasible solution due to the high costs of bandwidth and the limitations of what increased bandwidth can accomplish,” says Nidal Taha, regional director for the Middle East and Turkey at Blue Coat Systems. “ProxySG appliances deliver immediate and dramatic improvements in performance by optimizing the existing bandwidth between branch offices and the data centers where they access applications.”

UASC was established in July 1976, jointly by the six shareholding states from the Arabian Gulf - Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and U.A.E. The head office is located in the State of Kuwait, with a corporate office in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It is the largest Middle East-based ocean carrier of containerized cargo.