Releases

posted on 04 July 2008 10:02

4 July 2008 – Riverbed Technology (Nasdaq: RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), announced today that Gartner has identified the company in its recent July 2008 report, "Market Share: Application Acceleration Equipment, Worldwide 1Q08" as the WOC (WAN optimisation controller) Advanced Platform (AP) worldwide market share leader for 1Q 2008 based on revenue.

This is the 7th quarter in a row that Riverbed® has maintained the leadership position in the WOC AP category.

According to Gartner, the AP WOC category, which is most relevant to Riverbed WDS products, includes WOCs that address multiple WAN problems including limited bandwidth and excessive latency. AP WOCs incorporate TCP optimisations, delta-based byte caching and compression, and protocol specific optimisations for HTTP(S), MAPI and CIFS. AP WOCs may also include application specific optimisations such as SharePoint over HTTP, or AutoCAD using CIFS to further boost performance. In some cases they include traffic visibility, file and object caching, an optimised transport protocol, file format specific and advanced security capabilities. Riverbed refers to this same category as wide-area data services (WDS). Riverbed Steelhead® products are a unique combination of an application-independent foundation that improves the performance of all applications running over TCP, with an application-specific set of modules that address chatty application protocols.

“WDS deployments have moved far beyond the tactical to the strategic, with a great many large enterprise customers deploying Riverbed solutions at 50 to over 500 locations,” said Eric Wolford, senior vice president, marketing and business development at Riverbed. “We are seeing more CIOs take on a business strategist role, creating new enterprise-wide IT models to drive competitive differentiation. Riverbed has become the CIO’s choice because the ease-of-installation and management that is architected into our products allows them to scale their WDS deployments and because we offer the best performance for the broad range of applications important to their businesses.”

Organisations are continuing to expand geographically and, as a result, manage significant business operations outside of headquarters. For remote offices and data centres, Riverbed offers its Steelhead appliance product family. Steelhead appliances deliver enterprise-class WDS that scales across a range of applications and network topologies to accelerate applications by up to 100 times. For the growing mobile workforce, Riverbed introduced its Steelhead Mobile software client, which delivers LAN-like application performance to employees regardless of location, whether on the road, working from home or connected wirelessly in the office. To provide further strategic value, Riverbed expanded its offerings in 2008 to include the delivery of virtualised edge services, such as print, video streaming and IP address management, on the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP).

“The WDS product category is rapidly evolving, but speed remains the core requirement,” continued Wolford. “We built the RSP because our over 4,000 customers have recognised the strategic value of their Riverbed deployments. They see acceleration of application performance as the primary value, but want to leverage the more than 50,000 Steelhead appliances we’ve shipped worldwide.”

The RSP is an extensible data services platform that enables the delivery of virtualised edge services without the need to deploy additional physical servers at remote or branch offices. The RSP allows customers to deploy best-of-breed services from their choice of vendors on Steelhead appliances in a self-contained partition to minimise the hardware infrastructure footprint at the branch office. In a typical RSP deployment, IT infrastructure at the remote site is simplified to include an RSP-enabled Steelhead appliance and a router, reducing costs and minimising IT overhead.
Steelhead Products

Riverbed WDS solutions enable organisations of all sizes to overcome a host of severe problems, including poor application performance and insufficient bandwidth at remote sites. By speeding the performance of applications between data centres, remote offices and mobile workers by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times, Riverbed’s award-winning Steelhead WDS products enable companies to consolidate IT, improve backup and replication processes to ensure data integrity, and improve staff productivity and collaboration. Steelhead products have been deployed in organisations ranging from the world’s largest corporations with offices around the globe to small companies with a couple of sites that are just miles apart. To learn more, view Riverbed’s demo: www.riverbed.com/pr/jack.

About Riverbed

Riverbed Technology is the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS) solutions for companies worldwide. By enabling application performance over the wide area network (WAN) that is orders of magnitude faster than what users experience today, Riverbed is changing the way people work, and enabling a distributed workforce that can collaborate as if they were local. Additional information about Riverbed (Nasdaq: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com.

^{[Formatted by Wendy Matthews.]}