We did not evaluate other, standalone SSL decryption appliances. We have a vendor who looks at a lot of the things in the IT world and who reports their best assessment to us, based upon what their engineers are looking at. Based on the size of our organization and their experience with us, they pointed us in this direction.

There was a competitive process that went to bid.

We demo'ed Blue Coat SSL Visibility. It doesn't support net devices because it needs to see all the source IP addresses. It encrypts and decrypts the traffic according to the source IP address, but after the firewall, the source IP address changes. So it can't catch the same traffic, encrypt it again, and send it to the internet. This was the main difference as far as our project goes.

Another difference is that Blue Coat is not a local answer.