Is Riverbed just another has been competitor to Cisco? 6000+ customers don't think so

In April of last year, Cisco's Doug Gourlay blogged that he didn't see Riverbed as a competitor, but more as a niche player.  I am curious what Doug's current thoughts are after the latest battle?

The David vs. Goliath fight continues in the WAN optimization market with pioneer and market leader Riverbed winning the latest battle against the 800 pound gorilla Cisco.  The most recent battle took place in public earnings reports, which is obviously a quarterly measurement of a company's success or challenges they may be having in a particular market.  Riverbed recently surprised wall street by demonstrating positive growth in a landscape where flat is considered good.  Cisco on the other hand reported (see slide 29 of their Q3 09 earnings presentation here) that their application networking business was down 31% year over year.      

Riverbed continues to demonstrate that it takes more than just a big name with virtually unlimited resources to dominate the WAN optimization market.  WAN optimization is fast becoming very strategic to organizations and selecting a best of breed solution is critical to successfully achieving strategic IT initiatives that accelerate cost cutting and deliver a tremendous ROI.  Riverbed continues to dominate Cisco and others by winning 9 out of 10 in head to head product bake-offs.  Riverbed's product is best of breed and this is proving to be more important than the stature of the company.

No forward looking statements from me, but I can say that I am looking forward to competing with Cisco in the WAN optimization market.

Comments

[Larry Chaffin]

I think it is funny how you have not heard that much from Cisco since my blogs on Networkworld. I installed a eval at a customer for a bake off, was installed and running in less than 20 minutes with WCCP, QOS and Fast TCP. It took two Cisco engineers two days to tune the Cisco WAAS to get it to work.

Then is still could not work better than the steelhead.