Riverbed positioned in Leaders Quadrant of leading analyst firm's Magic Quadrant for WAN optimisation controllers

Riverbed Technology, (NASDAQ: RVBD), the IT performance company, announced today that it has been positioned by Gartner in the Leaders Quadrant of the 2012 “Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimisation Controllers (WOC)”, authored by Joe Skorupa and Severine Real and published in January 2012.

According to Gartner, the report positions vendors in one of four quadrants - Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players - based on the companies' vision and ability to execute on that vision.

According to the report: “Leaders exhibit an ability to shape the market by introducing additional capabilities in their product offerings and by raising awareness of the importance of these features. We expect a leader to grow the market as a whole and to have solutions that resonate with an increasing number of enterprises. Leaders in the WOC market need to have a broad feature set, including QoS, generic compression, protocol acceleration and file system acceleration, with the majority of features proved in substantial real-world implementations. They also need to be able to offer sales and support on a global basis.”

“Riverbed is proud to be recognised as a leader in the WOC market by Gartner. We have long focused on addressing the needs of our enterprise customers by delivering world-class technology and providing the high-quality, fast-response support and services required by globally distributed organisations,” said Eric Wolford, executive vice-president and GM, products, at Riverbed.

“As we work closely with our customers on our product innovations, we're finding that there are several new technology frameworks that force their performance requirements to evolve, including the growth of cloud services models, new traffic types and the introduction of new computing platforms, such as tablets and mobile devices. As our customers adopt these new technology frameworks, Riverbed will continue to develop innovative solutions that meet the performance needs of the ever-changing enterprise.”

In today's data centre-centric world, where workers are increasingly distributed, but IT is being centralised, solutions are needed that address the broad set of performance requirements necessary to truly virtualise and centralise IT, while ensuring end-user performance.

Over the last year, Riverbed has substantially enhanced and grown its portfolio of solutions that address performance for the globally connected enterprise, including WAN optimization, virtual application delivery controllers (vADCs), application-aware network performance management (NPM) and cloud storage gateways.

“As organisations continue to build out the data centre of the future, Riverbed will be there beside them to implement flexible architectures that allow them to bridge the gap between the data centre and users, and consumers at the edge,” continued Wolford.

“These solutions will provide seamless integration between the data centre and globally distributed operations, allowing organisations to leverage their investment in the data centre to their global operations.”

In 2011, Riverbed introduced new features and capabilities to its Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) that broaden the company's support for key enterprise applications and extend its leadership in delivering speed, scale, simplicity and security to the globally connected enterprise.

With RiOS 7.0, Riverbed expanded its already broad set of optimisations to include native support for hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) video, User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and IPv6, and has extended its existing optimisations for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Quality of Service (QoS), scale and security enhancements also provide organisations with greater control over business-critical applications.

Today's enterprises are increasingly adopting public cloud computing services to avoid costly infrastructure build-out, and to bring efficiency to business models such as software as a service (SaaS). As a result, business applications in the cloud, having once resided within the corporate network, are being accessed over an often-unpredictable public Internet.

In May 2011, Akamai and Riverbed announced their intention to develop a joint solution that leverages a combination of Internet optimisation and wide area network (WAN) optimisation to overcome the performance, availability, scalability and security issues introduced by this hybrid network environment. The solution is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2012.

Riverbed recently introduced its new portfolio of asymmetric software- and virtual-based offerings, including application delivery controllers (ADC), Web content optimisation (WCO) and Web application firewalls.

The new Stingray product family is enabling enterprises to migrate to, and receive the greatest benefits of, modern data centre architectures by providing flexible application delivery across private and public clouds. The new products enable enterprises to host applications in any physical, virtual or cloud environment, and to cost-effectively scale application acceleration and optimisation as needed, on-demand. The Stingray product family is based on technologies acquired from Zeus Technology and Aptimize in July 2011.

Riverbed was identified as the Advanced Platform WAN optimisation controller worldwide market share leader, based on revenue, for the first three reported quarters of 2011 by Gartner [1-3].

With its range of best-of-breed products, Riverbed can tailor the best possible approach to deliver performance from the application to the end-user, creating a richer end-user experience, enabling more productive employees, and cutting the cost of IT infrastructure in the data centre, cloud and branch office.

More than 16 000 organisations worldwide depend on Riverbed to understand, optimise and consolidate their IT infrastructure, through solutions that overcome performance issues caused by distance, distributed computing, and ever-increasing volumes of data. As IT organisations embark on strategic initiatives to virtualize, consolidate and migrate workloads into cloud environments, users are moved farther from their data, and slow applications, file transfers and inefficient Web sites negatively impact the performance of these initiatives.

Riverbed transforms IT performance by providing solutions spanning WAN optimization, application-aware NPM, application delivery, Web content optimisation (WCO), and cloud data protection for backup, archive and disaster recovery. By providing the broadest portfolio of performance solutions that deliver anywhere, any application optimisation, Riverbed enables organisations to increase productivity and efficiency, while enhancing business resilience and controlling costs.

1. Gartner, Inc., “Market Share: Application Acceleration Equipment, Worldwide, 1Q11” by Joe Skorupa and Nhat Pham, June 2011
2. Gartner, Inc., “Market Share: Application Acceleration Equipment, Worldwide, 2Q11” by Joe Skorupa and Nhat Pham, September 2011
3. Gartner, Inc., “Market Share: Application Acceleration Equipment, Worldwide, 3Q11” by Joe Skorupa and Nhat Pham, December 2011