I know what you may be thinking. Having my name in the title of this blog is completely and utterly self serving. While there may be a hint of truth to that, the Bob I am talking about is not your's truly, but rather the acronym for a product that promises to have a dramatic and positive impact on the IT infrastructure environment at branch offices around the globe.
Riverbed has over 5000 customers and a large number of these customers have relied on Riverbed's solution to enable the successful consolidation of branch office file servers, mail servers, and tape backup systems to central data centers. Riverbed solves the perofrmance challenges with accessing the consolidated assets that have been moved from the local LAN to a high latency, limited bandwith WAN. While a set of customers may move directly to a total consolidation effort, many customers will opt to keep a set of services like authentication, dns/dhcp, and print local. There are also other branch office services like security, streaming media, and monitoring and reporting that take precious server or appliance real estate at the branch office.
With the upcoming release of RiOS 5.5, the software that powers Riverbed's groundbreaking Steelhead appliance, Riverbed is delivering an all encompassing appliance that combines industry leading WAN optimization and application acceleration with local branch office services like authentication, dns/dhcp, print serving, streaming media, security, and more! You can read more here
Riverbed's strategy is to not develop these branch office services, but instead partner with vendors that provide these best of breed capabilities. The foundation partner for this branch office box product is VMware as Riverbed is leveraging VMware's industry-leading virtualization platform as the base for installing services from Riverbed partners like Microsoft, Opnet, InfoBlox, Wowza, Secure Computing and others.
This is a big win for organizations that want to consolidate their branch office IT infrastructure not only to the data center, but also at the branch office. Compared to other WAN optimization vendors that have limited WAN optimization capability and try to compensate with limited extracurricular functionality like security, Riverbed's BOB box provides best of breed WAN optimization, application acceleration combined with best of breed branch office services from leading vendors like Secure Computing, Microsoft, Infloblox, and others.
I am looking forward to seeing Bob show up at branch offices around the globe.
