Riverbed can shed the "one trick pony" label

Riverbed's Steelhead WAN optimization appliance has been arguably one of the most successful IT infrastructure products since it started shipping in May 2004.  While the overwhelming market success of Steelhead is undeniable, many industry followers continued to wonder if Riverbed would be able to expand our market reach beyond our core WAN optimization competency.

My initial response to the industry followers is that if you are going to have a single product and market focus, what better market to focus on than the WAN optimization market?  Riverbed's Steelhead family of WAN optimization products has a profound impact on a variety of IT initiatives ranging from application performance to infrastructure consolidation to disaster recovery and business continuity.  Not only is there huge value with our WAN optimization products (ask our customers), there is also a large untapped market with future customers that have yet to deploy WAN optimization.  

That being said, I am happy to say that the last 2 years has seen Riverbed expand beyond our core Steelhead family of WAN optimization products.  The result is new technology, capabilities, and value for markets that extend beyond the core WAN optimization market.

The Jan 2009 acquisition of Mazu Networks, and ultimately the release of Cascade, was a clear signal that Riverbed was serious about expanding our solution set beyond core WAN optimization.  Cascade combines advanced analytics with a powerful drill-down capability to deliver an awesome solution for obtaining visibility into network and application performance.  With the recent acquisition of CACE technologies, we have rounded out our network monitoring solution set with the addition of a robust suite of packet capture, and analysis technology. 

The recent launch of Whitewater, our groundbreaking solution for optimizing cloud storage, is yet another example of how Riverbed continues to innovate in areas adjacent to the WAN optimization market.  Whitewater enables customers to leverage public cloud storage provider environments to perform data backup and recovery.

While I am excited about our new products and new market potential, I am also happy to say that we continue to focus on our foundation Steelhead WAN optimization family of products with innovative features and capabilities delivered with every major software update.  Keep your eyes open for an upcoming announcement on this front.

Can we finally shed the one trick pony label?