Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Recreational Traffic Control On Your Network With Packeteer

Cupertino, Calif. - November 12, 2007 - Packeteer® (NASDAQ: PKTR), the global leader in WAN application delivery, today announced the release of new application classification plug-ins that enable customers to automatically identity and control online games such as Halo 3, which access Microsoft's Xbox Live network, as well as MSN Instant Messaging (IM), Video and BitTorrent Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic that can consume enormous amounts of network bandwidth and negatively impact the performance of critical applications for end users. With these new plug-ins, Packeteer PacketShaper® and iShaper™ appliances can now measure and contain the impact of three extremely prevalent recreational applications that run the risk of crippling enterprise and university networks.

"As organizations seek to ensure high-performance application delivery with network optimization and acceleration tools, the increased traffic of new and tremendously popular recreational applications is running counter to that effort," says Peter Sevcik, president of NetForecast, an internationally recognized engineering consulting company that benchmarks, analyzes, and improves the performance of networked data, voice, and video applications. "While businesses may actually want to enable some video or P2P traffic, unchecked gaming, P2P and video downloads are among the biggest drains on corporate and college networks. This can lead to poor productivity, wasted network bandwidth and sluggish performance of critical applications. A complete application delivery strategy must first provide granular visibility so organizations can decide which applications are mission critical and which are not."

Gaming applications such as Halo 3, file sharing programs such as BitTorrent and instant messaging applications using IP-based video are now widely downloaded and accessed by users that work across all types of organizations, from colleges to corporations to government agencies. Whether or not an organization can control and limit the impact of these applications is first determined by their ability to discover them. At the same time, accurate discovery of these applications is also key to ensuring that acceleration technology is not mistakenly applied. Data transfer techniques that do not first identify all network traffic can actually accelerate recreational applications to the detriment of business transactions.

Packeteer's unique network optimization and acceleration platform can discover, monitor and prioritize the performance of over 600 applications and protocols. By continually expanding its market-leading base of application classification plug-ins, Packeteer automatically detects, monitors and optimizes a wide range of application and protocol categories that include client/server, content delivery, database and ERP, directory services, e-mail and collaboration, peer-to-peer, and voice over IP. Through this application intelligence and market-leading acceleration and optimization technology, Packeteer provides its customers with a set of tools that truly delivers a "network that thinks."

The new plug-ins are downloadable software modules that seamlessly integrate with Packeteer's application classification architecture and include application visibility, monitoring and control for:

  • Xbox Live network downloads such as Halo 3, one of the world's most popular video games with 5.2 million copies currently in use;
  • MSN IM Video, which offers high quality, synchronized video as part of MSN's instant messaging services, currently used by 100 million people worldwide;
  • BitTorrent, a global standard for delivering P2P file downloads for 150 million users worldwide.

New Plug-In Availability

All new plug-ins are available immediately to licensed/subscribing customers at www.packeteer.com/support/down_main.cfm.

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