At Riverbed Analyst Day 2013, Riverbed Technology announced a new and expansive product and market strategy designed for growth.
Riverbed has emerged from a four-year effort to transform from a single-product company to a platform company and with its expanded product set is well-positioned to address a market more than 10 times the current size of its original core market and growing at a combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 5%.
Nearly everyone uses applications, data and networks, and we do this everywhere, at headquarters and in branches, home offices, and remote offices, on planes and on our phones.
Yet long distances and multiplying locations in the physical world cause latency (which slows down applications) and bandwidth limitation issues (which increase costs) in the digital world that affect application performance and impact collaboration and productivity.
“We started Riverbed 11 years ago to eliminate distance and location as variables in delivering applications by solving the problems of latency and bandwidth limitations in wide area networks,” says Jerry M. Kennelly, chairman and CEO, co-founder of Riverbed.
“We’re proud of our heritage in pioneering the WAN optimisation market and we believe that Steelhead has an important and bright future. But, Riverbed today is much more than WAN Optimisation.
“Over the last four years, we’ve made the journey from a single product to four major product sets that add up to something much bigger — the industry’s most complete application performance platform to enable a concept we call: Location-Independent Computing,” Kennelly continues. “We made the investment. We did the work. We have the products. Now, it’s time to capitalise.”
Today, Riverbed together with its partners offers the most complete platform that allows customers to embrace Location-Independent Computing to leverage location and distance for competitive advantage. Location-Independent Computing gives IT the flexibility to host applications and data in the most optimal locations while ensuring flawless delivery and best user experiences.
Organisations that embrace Location-Independent Computing achieve higher people productivity, better leverage of global skills/resources and radically reduce TCO.
During the last four years, Riverbed has continued to invest in its core business of WAN Optimisation. Riverbed Steelhead remains the industry’s number one WAN optimisation solution, winner of the InfoWorld 2013 Technology of the Year Award seven years running.
It’s always been known for accelerating delivery of applications to the branch and now it also accelerates delivery of SaaS and cloud-based applications. And, now with Path Selection, Steelhead can prioritise mission-critical apps for delivery over the fastest networks while delivering lower-priority apps over the Internet.
In addition, Riverbed has been expanding beyond its original value proposition with significant investments in innovation that led to the development of Riverbed Granite, a storage delivery solution that reduces TCO and expedites branch office backup, recovery and restore of applications and data after disasters or outages.
In addition, Riverbed has acquired innovative technologies that solve related IT performance problems. Riverbed Stingray is the most flexible ADC on the market and recognised as the most visionary solution to optimise secure and scalable delivery of applications from private or public clouds to users anywhere.
The acquisition of Mazu in 2009 and CACE Technologies in 2010 led to the development of the Riverbed Network Performance Management (NPM) product line, and the acquisition of Opnet in 2012 led to the development of Riverbed Application Performance Management (APM) products.
Together, these make up the Riverbed Performance Management product line, which provides enterprise-class end-user, application and network performance management to detect and fix performance problems before end users notice.
All of these products come together in the Riverbed Application Performance Platform, which ensures applications perform as expected, data is always available when needed and performance issues are detected and fixed before end users notice. Together with its partners, Riverbed offers the most complete platform for Location-Independent Computing.
The technological capabilities of these products to enable location independence are converging:
* Riverbed Steelhead is in the WAN Optimisation market, sized by some at about $1-billion and shrinking in the view of some analysts – when looked at from the traditional perspective.
But, Riverbed sees elasticity and some resurgence in the market driven by the cloud and growing demand by companies who find they have to optimise SaaS apps, such as Microsoft Office 365 and SFDC, or they simply won’t work.
* Riverbed Granite is in the Branch Converged Infrastructure market, sized by IDC at about $4-billion, growing at 5,2% CAGR.
* Riverbed Stingray is in the ADC market, sized at about $2-billion, growing at a CAGR of 4,2%.
* In the Riverbed Performance Management space, the lines between the NPM market (Riverbed’s Cascade product line) and APM market (the OPNET products) are blurring, as companies discover they need both NPM and APM to optimise performance of applications across networks, applications and end-user experiences.
The combined Performance Management market is sized at about $4-billion, growing at a 7% CAGR.
These markets include the technologies that come together to create a global platform for Location-Independent Computing that removes the barriers of distance and location for-billions of people. That overall market for Application Performance Infrastructure is sized at about $11-billion and growing at about a 5% CAGR.
At the Analyst Day, Jerry and CFO Ernie Maddock will also detail some of the operational moves that Riverbed is making in the sales, channels, alliances, marketing, product development and financial management arenas in order to successfully market, sell and implement an infrastructure platform at global scale.
