I don't understand why this is being portrayed as something "new" to IT. I work for a medium sized company, and we have been doing this for nearly 5 years. There are a slew of vendors in this space including F5 Networks, Citrix, Sun, and Microsoft. The technology works be installing the SSL certificate onto the appliance rather than the server. If designed correctly, this is no less secure than the conventional model, and can save significant processing load on web servers.