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Riverbed Unveils Product Direction for Accelerating Cloud Environments for Enterprises and Government
(Market Wire Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 11/17/09 --
Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the
IT infrastructure performance company for networks, applications and
storage, today announced its product direction for accelerating the cloud
for enterprises and government. Building on its success in enabling
organizations large and small to build private clouds, in 2010 Riverbed®
will begin to introduce solutions that extend the benefits
of acceleration to applications and storage in the public cloud. First
among these will be virtual Steelhead® for the cloud, a new addition to
Riverbed's
award-winning WAN optimization product family. At its publicly Webcast cloud launch event in
New York City, Riverbed demonstrated the benefits of its upcoming virtual
appliance for the public cloud. In addition, Riverbed unveiled and
demonstrated new technology for the acceleration of cloud storage.
Participating in the event with Riverbed were Amazon, AT&T, BT, IBM, Orange
Business Services and Riverbed customer Lantmännen.
"For over five years we've delivered the market-leading solution for WAN
optimization that overcomes the performance barrier to successfully
consolidating IT infrastructure into private clouds," said Eric Wolford, senior vice president, marketing and
business development at Riverbed. "These same performance issues also
affect enterprises as they move to public clouds. With our forthcoming
products we will help customers break the performance barrier for cloud
applications and cloud storage, starting with virtual Steelhead for the
cloud. We will help customers achieve the promised benefits of the public
cloud, while ensuring the same
high-performance access to applications and storage that they have come to
expect from their Riverbed-accelerated private clouds."
"The cloud" is emerging at the convergence of
three major trends: service orientation, virtualization and further
consolidation of IT infrastructure. Leading analysts define the cloud based
on three models, including private data centers or private clouds; public,
shared services or public clouds; and hybrid or virtual private clouds,
which allow large enterprises and governments to benefit from the cost and
operational advantages of public clouds while still providing control over
critical assets. Riverbed currently provides solutions for private clouds
and has worked with many organizations to enable centralized and
virtualized infrastructure. Companies that have built private clouds with
Riverbed include Lantmännen, Rayonier, the Canadian Cancer Society, Constagny, Brook and Smith, and
Simpson Strong-Tie.
Lantmännen, one of the largest food, energy and agricultural groups in the
Nordic region, relies on Riverbed to ensure performance over private cloud
infrastructure. "We are consolidating thousands of servers from hundreds of
branch offices into two virtualized data centers. We selected Riverbed to
ensure performance as we centralize applications, consolidate local servers
and defer telecom spending across hundreds of sites. We expect to cut $6.5
million in overall IT infrastructure costs in one year, while improving
overall IT infrastructure performance. Without Riverbed, it would have been
impossible to roll out our private cloud initiatives without compromise."
Riverbed has developed technology that will broaden its cloud offerings to
help enterprise and public sector customers address the performance issues
that will occur as they embrace adoption of private, public and hybrid
cloud models and their users move further from their data.
"High latency alone will limit the types of applications that can find a
home in the cloud," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at the
Enterprise Strategy Group. "Forcing new interfaces or rewriting
applications to take advantage of the cloud will be another deal breaker
for a lot of folks. If Riverbed can solve these issues the way they did
for applications and data transfers on the WAN, they will open up the
entire market. If I can think of the cloud the way I think about a disk
drive today, the possibilities become truly endless."
Speeding Application Performance
The award-winning Riverbed Steelhead product family offers organizations of
all sizes acceleration of applications and data regardless of location,
including remote offices, private data centers and mobile workers. Today,
Riverbed demonstrated virtual Steelhead for the cloud, which extends the
benefits of Riverbed WAN optimization by accelerating the performance of
applications and data transfers across private, public and hybrid cloud
infrastructures. The demonstration included installation of the product in
Amazon AWS.
"Riverbed's new virtual Steelhead for the cloud will be an important piece
for cloud computing architectures," said Zeus Kerravala, senior vice
president, Yankee Group. "The new solutions promise to overcome performance
challenges, one of the key barriers to widespread cloud adoption."
Accelerating Cloud Storage
Many enterprises and governments see migration of storage to the cloud as
an attractive option for cost and operational reasons. Storage needs are
exploding and CIOs would like to make storage growth "someone else's
problem." However, concerns about performance, the need to rewrite
applications, and fears about vendor lock-in could stall the movement of
storage to the cloud.
"Cloud storage, while offering potential operational and cost benefits, has
inherent latency issues," said Joe Skorupa, Research Vice President at
Gartner, Inc. "Users should take appropriate measures to ensure that either
the type of data stored in the cloud can withstand latency issues or that
measures are in place to overcome these concerns."
Similar to how Riverbed addressed fundamental protocol inefficiencies for
applications (used over the WAN) that resulted in order of magnitude
performance gains, Riverbed unveiled at the event, advanced new technology
that addresses fundamental protocol inefficiencies for block storage
protocols that again produce order of magnitude performance gains over the
WAN. What was deemed impossible before -- running any block protocol over
the WAN -- was demonstrated to be possible. This new innovation enables
thousands of miles of separation between storage and compute resources,
transforming the WAN into a SAN (iSCSI).
"Our new technology will change the way enterprises and governments think
about storage," said Wolford. "No longer will storage have to be tethered
locally to the server. This frees IT leaders to locate and move storage
assets to sites anywhere in the world, even thousands of miles away, to
deliver the most cost-effective and intelligent architectures. This
capability allows enterprises to bridge the public cloud and the private
cloud -- allowing them to take advantage of the best of both worlds."
Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including
statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed's products and
services, statements of the plans, strategies and objectives of Riverbed
management regarding future products and product plans, statements
regarding the growth characteristics of, and customer demand relating to,
the cloud market, statements regarding Riverbed's ability to grow the cloud
market, statements regarding performance results of Riverbed solutions and
customer cost savings following implementation of Riverbed solutions that
may suggest likely or certain outcomes, and statements relating to
Riverbed's ability to meet the needs of distributed organizations. 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 30, 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.
About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is the IT infrastructure 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 Technology, Riverbed, Steelhead, RiOS, Interceptor, Think Fast,
the Riverbed logo, Mazu, Profiler and Cascade are trademarks or registered
trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used or
mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
MEDIA CONTACT
Kristalle Ward
Riverbed Technology
415-247-8140
Email Contact
INVESTOR RELATIONS CONTACT
Renee Lyall
Riverbed Technology
415-247-6353
Email Contact
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