Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the IT performance company, today announced that the company has been positioned by Gartner in the Leaders quadrant of the 2010 “Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimisation Controllers” authored by Severine Real, Andy Rolfe and Joe Skorupa and published in December 2010. According to Gartner, this 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, “The WOC (WAN optimisation controller) market is maturing rapidly, but remains dynamic, with a high level of innovation from vendors.” Further, “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 features 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.”
“We are very appreciative of being recognised as a product leader in WAN optimisation. By focusing on the needs of enterprise customers in conjunction with developing world-class technology, we believe that Riverbed® has earned its position and expanded its lead,” said Eric Wolford, senior vice president, marketing and business development at Riverbed. “As the market continues to evolve we will continue to develop innovative solutions that meet the demands of a globally connected business environment.”
The Future Is Now: Cloud Computing, Branch Office Consolidation and VirtualisationOver the past year Riverbed has focused its efforts on meeting the ever-changing needs of global organisations, which has led to the development of a comprehensive solution that provides LAN-like performance no matter where an employee or data is located. The breadth of the Riverbed product family has expanded to provide organisations with enterprise-wide network and application visibility, unmatched performance for large-scale data center-to-data center replication, “local” performance for remote and mobile workers, and acceleration for private and public cloud environments. In 2010, Riverbed introduced three new products to address the growing demands of the global enterprise:• Virtual Steelhead™ enables customers to deploy Riverbed WAN optimisation solutions in a broader range of environments that may have specialised requirements, such as ruggedised environments or environments with space limitations, as well as data centers that have been heavily virtualised.• Riverbed Cloud Steelhead™ instances accelerate the process of migrating data and applications to the public cloud, and accelerate access to that data and those applications from anywhere.• The Riverbed Whitewater TM appliance provides organisations with a fast, secure and cost-efficient method to seamlessly integrate cloud storage into their existing backup infrastructure and disaster recovery (DR) strategies.
With these new solutions, Riverbed helps deliver flexible, accelerated performance without requiring IT organisations to make changes to their current architecture.
To address the needs of organisations looking to embrace globalisation and empower employees in remote offices, IT departments have traditionally deployed rich resources at the enterprise edge, which has proven to add complexity to an organisation’s IT infrastructure. The Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) provides enterprises with a Branch Office Box (BOB) solution that addresses the enterprises’ desire to provide branch offices with essential edge IT services, while eliminating the amount of distributed servers. The RSP allows enterprises to run up to five additional services or applications virtually in a protected partition on the Steelhead® appliance. In addition to providing support for local print services, DNS/DHCP and enterprise video, Riverbed expanded its partner ecosystem in 2010 to also provide McAfee Firewall Enterprise and Web Gateway products, Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway, Polycom Video Edge, and Vyatta Subscription Edition router software as edge service packages on the RSP.
Expanding Reach: Strong Partner Ecosystem
With the ability to foster a strong, collaborative sales engagement environment between the company and its partners, the Riverbed Partner Network (RPN) delivers a coverage model that optimises a customer’s ability to acquire and implement Riverbed solutions in a manner that best fits their needs — through either value added resellers, systems integrators or service providers, in either capital expense or operating expense financial models.
With the addition of two-tier distribution in North America and by strengthening a global ecosystem of service provider relationships, Riverbed is focused on market expansion strategies in WAN optimisation, as well as high-growth market segments such as cloud, disaster recovery and virtualisation. “As the market matures we will continue to align our product and distribution strategies to support growing global organisations,” added Wolford. “Our solution is a critical component in developing a cost-effective and efficient IT infrastructure because we enable organisations to successfully consolidate, virtualise and accelerate data and applications anywhere in the world.”
Riverbed Named Q3 2010 Market Share Leader
In a December 2010 Gartner report titled “Market Share: Application Acceleration Equipment, Worldwide, 3Q10,” authored by Joe Skorupa and Nhat Pham, Riverbed has been identified as the WOC (WAN optimization controller) Advanced Platform worldwide market share leader for 3Q10 based on revenue.
About the Magic Quadrant
The Gartner Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2010 by Gartner, Inc., and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
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 plans, strategies and objectives of Riverbed management, statements regarding or implying Riverbed’s ability to grow the WOC market, statements regarding the growth characteristics of certain market segments, statements about market share results that may suggest trends for our business, and statements relating to Riverbed’s ability to meet the needs of distributed organisations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they do not fully materialize 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 October 28, 2010. 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.
About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is the IT performance company. The Riverbed family of wide area network (WAN) optimization 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 www.riverbed.com.
Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service name or logo used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners.