Customer Testimonial: Greg Moore of SRG Partnership Architects

We have posted a new customer testimonial from Greg Moore, the IT Director at SRG Partnership Architects in Portland, Oregon. 

I met Greg at a recent Riverbed User Group function in Portland, and he approached me just to tell me about his enthusiasm for our products and for the remarkable results he and his firm have seen.  When we suggested that perhaps he might want to do a testimonial video, he jumped at the chance. 

We don't take Greg's enthusiasm for Riverbed lightly; he's an industry veteran of nearly 20 years who has seen a lot of technology. 

If YOU have had some good experiences with Riverbed products, including Steelheads, Cascade, or Riverbed Professional Services or Support, and you'd like to share them with the world, let us know. We are always looking for testimonials.

Thanks to Greg for his enthusiastic endorsement.

 

 

3 more Interop NYC 2010 videos

Riverbed's VP of Product Marketing, Apurva Dave, took part in a panel discussion on WAN Optimization and Virtualization in the Branch office at Interop 2010 in New York City last week. 

First, Apurva spoke for about 10 minutes..

 

Then the panel discussion began.  (It's in two parts due to YouTube limits.)  The second part ends with a short commentary by Apurva of how the panel discussion went.

 

 

Riverbed and Giants painting San Francisco orange

I consider myself a pretty conservative guy.  No tattoos.  No body piercings.  So what was I thinking when I decided to semi-permanently die my hair bright orange?  To make a long story short,an internal movement at Riverbed titled "Team Orange" was started several years ago when we were a much smaller company.  The idea was simple.  When we hit the the "50" milestone then willing participants would have to dye their hair Riverbed orange for 30 days. 

The "50" milestone hit twice recently.  First, Riverbed's stock price recently passed the 50 mark.  Secondly, Riverbed's market share (revenue) in the WAN optimization market was reported to be more than 50% higher than the next competitor, Cisco.

Coincidentally, another San Francisco franchise by the name of the San Francisco Giants, recently passed their own milestone.  The Giants are in the World Series, which hasn't been the case since 2002.  I can't help, but to draw some interesting parallels to Riverbed and the Giants.  The first is that the Giant's team color is strikingly similar to the color of Riverbed's logo.  Secondly, Riverbed's fan base is just as enthusuastic as the Giants.  Last, but certainly not least is the fact that both Riverbed and the Giants overcame major competition to reach a big milestone.  The Giants beat a much more talented and highly favored Phillies team to reach the World Series.  Riverbed also overcame underdog status to beat the mighty Cisco to dominate the WAN optimization market.

For the next 30 days, I will be proudly wearing my orange hair in honor of both Riverbed and the Giants!

 

 

Interop NYC Videos!

We've got five new videos from Interop 2010 in New York this past week, with more to come.  First up is Apurva Dave, Riverbed VP of Product Marketing talking about Virtualization in the Branch Office.

 

Next we have a couple of customer presentations from the booth at interop.  The first is from Joe Galardi of Jefferies.

 

The next is from Jeff Wilhelm of Accudata.

 

And finally a two-part video from John Lax of the International Justice Mission.  Part 1:

 

Part 2:

 

We'll have a few more videos from Interop next week.

Day Four at Interop NYC 2010

The fourth day of Interop NYC and the second day of the Vendor Expo began a lot like the previous day.  At 10:30, the doors swung open, and a huge throng of attendees came onto the expo floor.  In the Riverbed booth, we had a series of presentations from customers, and in between some introductory Riverbed presentations that included a live product demo.

The picture on the left is of Joe Gillardi, VP from Technology from Jefferies during his presentation.  On the right is one of our standing-room only audiences that filled our booth throughout the Vendor Expo.

One of my booth presentations included a very interesting and positive exchange with one of the attendees.  The live demo consists of the following:

1. We transfer a 3.5mb PowerPoint file, unoptimized from the show floor to our San Francisco office.  (The connection was a T1 with roughly 190ms latency.)  This takes about 45 seconds.
2. We enable Riverbed WAN Optimization.
3. We delete the first transfer and transfer the file a second time.  The 2nd transfer takes about 3 seconds. 
4. Then to demonstrate that we're not just a file caching solution, we rename the file and send it again.  Takes about 3 seconds again. 

One attendees who was standing in the back challenged me to edit the file and send that instead.  THAT, he said, would prove it's not a file caching solution.  I believe he thought he was heckling me.  So I did just that (opened the PPT file, changed a couple of things, and saved it with a new name).  The transfer of that file took about 3 seconds.  He came up to me after the presentation very impressed, and asked to have an account rep contact him.

Our technology is NOT about file caching.  Instead it's about de-duplication at the bit level.  Whether it's an email attachment, a CIFS transfer, or data embedded in some other type of application stream, if the Steelhead Appliance recognizes the bit stream, it de-duplicates it, sending a 16-byte reference to the data which is already stored on the remote Steelhead Appliance, rather than the megabytes or gigabytes of real data that's already been sent.  The remote Steelhead Appliance reconstructs the original data before sending it on to the user, who gets the exact same file (byte for byte) and is unaware that anything has changed.  Except that it got there a whole lot faster.

Anyway, Interop NYC 2010 is over.  We'll post some videos recorded at the show later on today.  Special thanks to our customer presenters, Joe Gillardi from Jefferies, Michael Hart from Mirubeni America, and Jeff Wilhelm from Accudata.

 

Riverbed goes application-aware with CACE acquisition

Riverbed announced today the acquisition of CACE Technologies.  This acquisition brings state-of-the-art network traffic recording, analysis, and inspection to our Cascade solution for network and application visibility.

Talk about synergies.  Not only will CACE bring innovate application-aware capabilities to the Riverbed product family, the fact that the flagship product is named the Shark appliance is already a good sign that it will fit in well with Riverbed's other fishy named Steelhead appliance product.

There is also a nice blog post within the Wireshark community at Wireshark.org.

Day three at Interop NYC 2010

Even though it really started on Monday, for many people, the Interop NYC 2010 conference began this morning at 10:30, when the big doors swung open for the Vendor Expo.  More than 125 vendors filled the massive exhibition hall, but if you came in through the main entrance, you could not miss the big, well-lit, and brightly colored Riverbed booth, which was brimming with activity all day.

There's a stage with a large video screen and about 25 seats, where a nearly continuous stream of presentations filled the seats with interested viewers.  Attendees got t-shirts for their time, but more importantly got some really good information about WAN Optimization.  We also had presentations from three Riverbed customers, each of whom told real stories about their Riverbed implementations, and the great benefits that they have received:

1. Michael Hart from Marubeni America
2. Jeff Wilhelm from Accudata
3. Joe Galardi from Jeffries

The rest of the booth contains a series of live demos from Riverbed people, and a couple of continuous video streams.  Overhead is the largest indoor sign I've ever seen.

On Thursday, the 3 customers will each speak again in our booth, and we'll have the same all-day stream of presentations.  There will also be a presentation from Apurva Dave,Vice President of Product Marketing during the afternoon at one of the breakout sessions (3:25pm in room 1E08).

We'll have more pictures tomorrow.

Day Two at Interop 2010

Today was the second day of the Interop NYC CIO Boot Camp.  As event sponsors, Riverbed was invited to have one of our customers speak before the group of about 40 CIOs.  The speaker was John Lax, Vice President of Information Systems for the International Justice Mission.

Mr. Lax spoke for about 30 minutes, and it was 30 minutes when nobody was checking their Blackberries or iPhones.  Everybody is familiar with mission-critical IT and the demands of users, but in Mr. Lax's world, these terms take on new meaning.  His organization doesn't measure ROI in terms of dollars, but rather in terms of lives saved and people helped.  As we've discussed in this space, IJM is a human rights agency that secures justice for victims of slavery, sexual exploitation and other forms of violent oppression.  Mr. Lax and his team do a truly amazing job in remarkable circumstances with a very small IT budget.

We expect to have a complete video of his presentation available on Friday.  Please make some time to see what he has to say.  It will change your perspective on IT.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) begins the Interop Vendor Expo.  Riverbed has booth #221, which is right inside the main entrance.  You won't miss our huge overhead sign; here it is this afternoon before it was hung up.

Day One at Interop 2010 NYC

Today I had the good fortune to sit in for about half the day in the CIO Boot Camp at Interop New York.  The CIO Boot Camp was sponsored by Riverbed (which is how I got to sit in).  The conversations and discussions were fascinating: what will be The Next Big Thing in IT, some fascinating approaches to Vendor Management, the present and future of outsourcing.  The moderator, Thornton May, was extremely lively and entertaining.

The Boot Camp continues tomorrow with a presentation from John Lax of the International Justice Mission.  We'll have pictures and discussions about it tomorrow night, and if all goes well, a complete video of his talk on our YouTube channel by the end of the week.

Riverbed is the only vendor sponsor of the CIO Boot Camp this year.  In past years, we've been one of a few vendors to sponsor it, but not this year. 

Riverbed is also very visible in the attendee enrollment area of the Javits Center.  Registration is performed on PCs that are spread out over a bunch of tables.  On each PC screen is a Riverbed ad, and next to each of the PCs is some Riverbed literature.  (See the picture on the left side.)

Also, right behind a statue of the Convention Center's namesake, Senator Jacob Javits, you can see a large poster-sized Riverbed ad ("Break the Performance Barrier"). (See the picture on the right.)  It's going to be very difficult to miss Riverbed if you attend Interop 2010 New York.

The expo floor opens Wednesday; look for us in Booth 221, in the big booth right inside the main entrance.

The Role of WAN Optimization in Cloud Infrastructures

As Evan Marcus noted, I did give a presentation at Storage Networking World (SNW) in Dallas last week on the "Role of WAN Optimization in Cloud Infrastructures."  I was quite impressed with the attendance, which was well beyond my expectations despite it being on the last day of the conference.  That's a indication there is strong interest in the topic.

Anyways, for those of you who weren't able to attend, I've summarized some of the main points of the presentation:

1)  The basic value proposition of the Cloud is for providers to obtain quantities of scale.  Cloud providers pass the benefits of lower per-unit IT costs to the enterprise customers through lower pricing for IT services (at a lower cost than the enterprise can procure those services themselves), while pocketing the remaining value as profit.  Cloud providers also provide deeper technical expertise through their specialization and focus on delivering IT services.

2) WAN optimization solutions deployed into the Cloud must similarly be able to scale.  A given WAN optimization product that might work for a small or medium-sized enterprise network will not necessarily be able to scale for a Cloud service provider's infrastructure, which must support multiple enterprise customers–some of them very large.  In such a massive-scale Cloud data center, the Cloud-hosted WAN optimization solution must be able to scale to extremely high connection counts, throughputs, and remote peer sites.  This is clearly a challenge for many WAN optimization product offerings in the market today.

3)  WAN optimization provides benefits for both Cloud Compute and Cloud Storage.  For Cloud computing, WAN optimization maintains fast access to cloud-hosted application data despite bandwidth and latency issues in the WAN.  For Cloud Storage, WAN optimization facilitates the backup and archival of enterprise data into the Cloud by speeding up the transfer of that data into the Cloud.

4)  Since WAN optimization is a dual-ended solution, the devices deployed in your network will have to interact with the WAN optimization devices deployed in the Cloud provider's infrastructure.    This becomes the natural conclusion when you consider that interoperability between WAN optimization products from different vendors is about as likely as Microsoft open-sourcing the software code behind Windows.  With this in mind, it becomes important to ensure that WAN optimization product you choose to deploy for your enterprise will also be supported by your Cloud provider.