Riverbed Technology, the IT infrastructure performance company for networks, applications and storage, has announced enhancements to its worldwide partner network programme intended to expand the company's reach and create new initiatives for the success of Riverbed, its customers, and its partners.
Programme enhancements include the following:
* New partner programmes for large account resellers (LARs), enhanced programme benefits for enterprise resellers.
* New partner programme for service provider partners.
* New specialisation offerings: Riverbed Authorised Support Partner (RASP) and Riverbed Authorised Consulting Partner (RACP), which will complement the Riverbed Authorised Training Partner (RATP) specialisation that is currently in place.
With these programme enhancements, Riverbed is delivering a comprehensive, strategic programme that enables the company to segment its partners based on the markets on which they focus. In addition, Riverbed's enhanced partner network programme will support each partner type by compensating Riverbed's partners for the unique value they provide to Riverbed and its customers.
"When surveyed by a leading analyst firm, Fortune 1000 IT executives list Riverbed as one of the top vendors with whom they plan to spend in 2010," says Dave Peranich, senior vice-president of worldwide sales at Riverbed. "These business leaders are choosing Riverbed's proven and highly-scalable solutions for their cost savings, productivity and cloud computing optimisation benefits. To better meet this expected demand and allow organisations of all sizes to work with their preferred partners to reap the full rewards of a Riverbed deployment, we have enhanced our partner network programme."
Aligning the channel to the customer need
The comprehensive Riverbed Partner Network (RPN) Programme enhancements create a robust offering for each type and size of Riverbed partner. The programme creates a compelling platform for partners to further engage with Riverbed to drive their organisation's growth by leveraging new lead generation, training and certification and sales incentive programmes that drive success both for the partners and their customers.
The programme enhancements include:
* New LAR and service provider programmes that enable Riverbed to drive deeper relationships in major accounts and provide unique benefits to those national and global partners.
* The Enterprise VAR programme, which offers incremental training and sales incentives that make it even more attractive for enterprise VARs to grow their business with Riverbed solutions.
Service providers - servicing global customers with complex technology needs
With this announcement, Riverbed is also formalising its service provider programme, which helps the company address the needs of large global customers with complex technology needs. Service providers that partner with Riverbed are able to go to market with a managed service based on its WAN optimisation solution, delivering a value-added service layered on their existing transport contracts that expands their relationship with the customer.
Customers benefit with pay-as-you-grow models and the ability to maximise their budgets by reducing upfront capital costs and leveraging operational expense budgets.
"Service providers are looking for strategic services to add to their solutions portfolios," says Peranich. "This programme builds on our several years' relationships with many of the industry's leading service providers and offers them benefits to make it even easier to partner with Riverbed to expand their managed service offerings."
Specialisation programmes: building closer relationships with Riverbed and its customers
To enable its reseller partners to act as an extension of the Riverbed support and professional services organisations, Riverbed is introducing a specialisation programme that supports all categories of its existing partners.
The specialisation programme will allow eligible partners to provide level 1/level 2 support, training, or various Riverbed-focused professional services to their customers. These specialisations allow the partners to build closer relationships with their customers and provide high-value services that the customers can leverage to get the full benefit of their Riverbed deployments.
The programme includes the following specialisations:
* RASP - Riverbed Authorised Support Partner
* RATP -- Riverbed Authorised Training Partner
* RACP -- Riverbed Authorised Consulting Partner
"Riverbed has spent the last three years building a robust partner eco-system supported by a partner programme with benefits that will drive value for its partners and customers alike. This announcement turns the dial on an already strong partner programme implementation and elevates Riverbed's competitive advantage," says Paul Myerson, senior channel strategy analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.
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Forward-looking statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed's products and services, statements regarding the growth characteristics of, and customer demand relating to, the WAN optimisation market, and statements relating to Riverbed's ability to meet the needs of distributed organisations, grow market share, and increase sales and customer count. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions, that, if they do not fully materialise or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; our ability to anticipate market needs or develop new or enhanced products to meet those needs; the adoption rate of our products; our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our distribution partners; our ability to compete in our industry; fluctuations in demand, sales cycles and prices for our products and services; shortages or price fluctuations in our supply chain; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Riverbed's business are set forth in our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on 30 October 2009. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Any future product, feature or related specification that may be referenced in this release are for information purposes only and are not commitments to deliver any technology or enhancement. Riverbed reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time.
Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is the IT infrastructure performance company. The Riverbed family of wide area network (WAN) optimisation solutions liberates businesses from common IT constraints by increasing application performance, enabling consolidation, and providing enterprise-wide network and application visibility - all while eliminating the need to increase bandwidth, storage or servers. Thousands of companies with distributed operations use Riverbed to make their IT infrastructure faster, less expensive and more responsive. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at http://www.riverbed.com.
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