Riverbed, Five Years On
It was August 2006 and I’d been at a Cisco reseller in Sydney Australia for a couple of years. One of my more progressive customers, a law firm with a major document access issue was desperate to get into WAN Optimisation - in any form. They’d centralised their legal libraries and case documents using Hummingbird’s DM5 Document Management system and access was sloooowwww from far flung places like Perth - 60ms to Sydney and Asia - 200ms+ to Sydney!
The reseller I worked for – a Cisco Gold reseller - was adamant that the solution would be in a teal coloured box, but alas WAAS had only just been released (having morphed from “WAFS”) and WAAS evaluation hardware was just not available in Australia. My customer said “Give me a Riverbed trial, or we’ll take our [integration] business elsewhere”!
Enter Damien Murphy our first Riverbed Systems Engineer (SE) in Australia. Damien and I met onsite, we put a quick design together, lab tested, then went for lunch. I was keen to move on from the reseller and Riverbed was hiring! About one month later and more interviews than I’ve had hot dinners, I became employee number four in Australia! Just a week prior we hired Tara Martin as our Inside Sales rep. so prior to her there were only two Riverbedders in the whole of Oz!
Five years on and I’m still a Riverbed SE! I think the best part of the job is being able to directly influence product design and features. My customers really do get what they want and it’s all included in their yearly maintenance. Also bugs or issues with a bespoke application are typically fixed in days rather than weeks or months, which makes my customers, and me, really happy!
I’ve seen Steelheads installed in 1,100 site networks, 1 site networks (plus Steelhead Mobile) and over latencies that’d make your eyes water! Yet even after such a massive amount of Steelheads purchased and deployed, demand just keeps on growing! Riverbed’s recent foray into Storage, Network Visibility and Application Delivery Control has just made the job a whole lot more challenging – which is what every good SE deserves!
Congratulations on this major milestone, Matt. Best wishes.
Warm regards,
Rasheed
http://MrVray.com
Posted by: Abdul Rasheed | January 10, 2012 at 06:04 AM