Sprint Introduces Secure Application and WAN Acceleration for Businesses

Sprint (NYSE:S) today announced the availability of Sprint SecureSM WAN Acceleration, a service that provides application acceleration and file access to remote offices for business-critical traffic and represents an extension to Sprint’s comprehensive managed services portfolio. The service enables enterprises and organizations fine-grained control over WAN traffic, so that they can have business-critical applications accelerated, malicious or unwanted traffic stopped and unimportant traffic managed or mitigated.

Sprint Secure WAN Acceleration is particularly beneficial for large, distributed organizations seeking to maximize resources, reduce costs and more efficiently use their transport to support business critical needs and real-time applications. Additionally, it can be paired with Sprint’s Multiprotocol Label Switching Virtual Private Network (MPLS VPN) solution, as an additional tool to help ensure WAN efficiency.

Sprint is leading the way in helping businesses evolve from legacy data and voice services to more robust IP and converged solutions. “As technology continues to evolve and as businesses grow and look beyond basic connectivity services, Sprint is helping them combine access services with security and application acceleration technology,” said Dan Dooley, president of Wireline, Sprint. “Optimizing a network by accelerating critical applications can have a profound impact on a business’ ability to meet its goals and objectives and gain needed efficiencies.”

Using appliances from Blue Coat Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:BCSI) – a market-leading vendor of WAN optimization and Secure Web Gateway solutions – as the foundation, Sprint Secure WAN Acceleration helps businesses optimize and manage traffic across the Wide Area Network (WAN). Through a combination of application visibility, management and tuning technologies, such as bandwidth management, protocol optimization, caching and compression, Sprint Secure WAN Acceleration enhances application performance and bandwidth availability.

“The Sprint Secure WAN Acceleration service fills a critical need for enterprises and government agencies by providing WAN optimization that selectively accelerates business-critical applications while stopping or managing malicious or unimportant traffic,” said Brian NeSmith, president and chief executive officer, Blue Coat Systems. “Sprint leverages our ProxySG appliances and ProxyClient software to offer a complete managed service that can stop the bad and accelerate the good.”

Across its portfolio, Sprint takes a layered approach to achieving network optimization, starting with the network; the Sprint IP/MPLS backbone is designed to maximize core performance and survivability. Furthermore, Sprint offers a number of network optimization solutions including Class of Service capabilities, multicast, Message Protection and DDoS prevention. Adding WAN Acceleration to this portfolio of services ensures customers achieve the most from their Sprint IP/MPLS transport investment.

Securing the Network and Accelerating Critical Business Applications

As businesses rely more on the network for access to critical applications and systems, collaboration with business partners and clients, as well as deployment of new technologies like VoIP and streaming video, application acceleration can boost network responsiveness, decreases download times, reduces bandwidth usage and ultimately increases business efficiency.

Sprint Secure WAN Acceleration includes built-in security and management capabilities, enabling organizations to boost application response time in branch or remote offices while ensuring that only safe and appropriate content is being accelerated across the network. At the same time, the service stops viruses or malware that can impact their business and delay normal business processes. Furthermore, through the creation of policies, these organizations can define and enforce Web usage – for example, to prioritize business-related traffic – while minimizing recreational usage.

"IDC has seen a growing interest in managed services for both network management and now WAN optimization,” said Tracy Corbo, senior analyst for IDC's Enterprise Communication Infrastructure service. “For some enterprise customers it makes more sense to purchase those services through their service provider and channel their own internal resources to other more strategic projects. WAN optimization has moved from ‘nice to have’ to ‘must have’ for accelerating enterprise applications and file access in a highly distributed organization."

Network management and optimization solutions, such as Sprint Secure WAN Acceleration, allow Sprint customers to benefit from a premium WAN experience. Sprint's core strength and leadership in the convergence of robust Network Security, IP Telephony and Managed Mobility solutions provides access and managed services for businesses when and where they need it, enabling them to respond quickly to changing business needs.

For more information on Sprint business solutions, visit www.sprint.com/business or contact your Sprint account team.

About Sprint Nextel

Sprint Nextel offers a comprehensive range of wireless and wireline communications services bringing the freedom of mobility to consumers, businesses and government users. Sprint Nextel is widely recognized for developing, engineering and deploying innovative technologies, including two wireless networks serving nearly 52 million customers at the end of the second quarter 2008; industry-leading mobile data services; instant national and international push-to-talk capabilities; and a global Tier 1 Internet backbone. For more information, visit www.sprint.com.

About Blue Coat Systems

Blue Coat secures Web communications and accelerates business applications across the distributed enterprise. Blue Coat’s family of appliances and client-based solutions – deployed in branch offices, Internet gateways, end points, and data centers – provide intelligent points of policy-based control enabling IT organizations to optimize security and accelerate performance between users and applications. Blue Coat has installed more than 40,000 appliances worldwide. Blue Coat’s headquarters is in Sunnyvale, Calif. and can be reached at 408-220-2200 or www.bluecoat.com.