Firewall puts on a Blue Coat

Firewall Systems signed a distribution agreement with secure content and application delivery provider Blue Coat Systems.

Blue Coat – formerly Cacheflow – had been distributing exclusively through LAN Systems over the past six months.

It sells a range of web content filtering, anti-virus, anti-spyware anti-phishing and communications control products to companies with proxy-based appliances.

The company's ProxySG and ProxyAV appliances let administrators control enterprise network traffic, including P2P, instant messaging, streaming media, HTTP and SSL encrypted web (HTTPS).

The appliances prevent spyware and viruses at the gateway before they load onto individual computers.

Nick Verykios, marketing director at Firewall Systems, said the distributor had identified a requirement for content filtering protection and HTTP virus scanning.

“More importantly, resellers need to pro-actively protect their customers from the growing threat of employees punching SSL holes through their company security policy and circumventing current content filtering, anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-phishing policies, monitoring and controls,” he said.

Blue Coat had secured some large rollouts in Australia including a 25,000 seat deal at Centrelink, which was conducted by channel partner Fujitsu.

In the meantime, Scott Frew, MD at Firewall Systems has previewed the distributor’s sophisticated SQL driven web-based ordering and reseller resource centre, dubbed FireStation.

The website allowed resellers to easily tie product, service and finance options to their orders and would soon feature an engine which lets them track annuity business.

Integrator Matrix CNI had been a FireStation beta tester. Andrew Ratcliff, marketing manager at the integrator, said the site was unique as it allowed the reseller to generate its own quotations on the fly.

This functionality was something that other distributors did not currently offer. Matrix would normally email other distributors for quotations, he said.

"It's 99 percent there and it's very useful," he said.