On Riverbed Analyst Day 2013, which was held recently, Riverbed Technology announced that it was expanding from WAN optimisation into Application Performance Infrastructure, which is an 11$ billion market. The company offers all its products such as Stingray and Granite, through this platform to ensure application perform as expected, data is always available and performance issues are detected and fixed immediately. Emerging from a four-year effort to transform from a single-product company to a platform company and with its expanded product set, the company believes it is in a good position to address a market more than 10 times the current size of its original core market, growing at a combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 5 percent, says the company.
Although applications, data and networks are used widely by everyone from all locations, 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. This affects 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, 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 adds. “We made the investment. We did the work. We have the products. Now, it’s time to capitalise.”
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. According to the company, organisations that embrace Location-Independent Computing achieve higher people productivity, better leverage of global skills/resources and radically reduce TCO.
