History

In the late 90s, Blue Reef originated from the Internet Service Provider (ISP) industry with a vision that all organisations would have to provide a well managed Internet service to their employees. Blue Reef then focused on developing an integrated and consolidated platform - the Sonar appliance - that allowed organisations to efficiently define granular Internet policies for their users. Sonar combined content filtering, quota management, bandwidth prioritisation and security entitlements into service plans (much like in an ISP environment).
Importantly, Blue Reef realised the significance of dynamically enforcing entitlements based on multiple criteria, such as, identity, time of day, location, security, quota, authentication and more to satisfy the growing complexity of customer environments. As such Blue Reef did this by developing a unique policy engine to provide a scalable Internet management platform by linking these plans with individuals, groups and circumstances, in real time.
Today Blue Reef’s leading Internet Management platform is used by hundreds of customers in Australia and New Zealand. Sonar enables businesses to consolidate their Internet services process into a single easy-to-use and easy-to-manage platform, including reports, billing, and compliance.
Sonar has been in development since 1998 and was first introduced to the market in 2003. Today, Sonar is in its 3rd generation and is on course to evolve into a 4th generation hybrid cloud based model.

Having come from an ISP background, Blue Reef pioneered the concept of providing Internet management services from a central location (cloud technology). At that time however, the available Internet connections did not have the capacity to sustain this delivery model, so the concept transitioned to produce the intellectual property as local client premises equipment.

Key Dates

1998: Internet Management technology platform development begins
2001: Blue Reef is incorporated as Internet Management IP spin-off
2003: 1st Sonar appliance product launched
2006: 2nd product generation launched, >150 installed systems
2008: 3rd product generation, >500 installed systems