San Francisco — July 11, 2005 — Riverbed Technology, the performance leader in application acceleration on wide area networks, today announced that NVIDIA, the worldwide leader in graphics processors and media communications devices, has selected Riverbed’s Steelhead™ appliances for deployment in NVIDIA remote offices worldwide. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and employs more than 2000 people worldwide.

With the addition of NVIDIA, Riverbed has hit the 200 th customer mark in just over 13 months of shipping product; the company released the first commercially available version of its Steelhead appliance in May of 2004. Riverbed announced its 100 th customer in March of 2005 and since then has grown its customer base by 100% in just one quarter.

“As a global enterprise, remote office productivity is a critical issue for NVIDIA,” said Ed Yee, VP of IT at NVIDIA. “We installed Riverbed’s Steelhead appliance and it has been a win-win for both the IT staff and remote users. Users have noticed increased download speeds both internally and from the Internet, and server browsing of US-based systems is a lot faster. Users no longer get frustrated with the dreaded "slow network." At the same time, the product installed transparently and system administrators can move images and files with ease. In addition, because Steelhead has the ability to move files via straight Windows copy, we no longer need to enable HTTP or FTP on each and every file system.”

Riverbed’s Steelhead appliance is the only application acceleration product on the market that solves all the key problems with application performance on wide area networks (WANs) that are experienced by virtually every multi-site company in the world: The company’s Steelhead appliances deliver the industry’s best network compression, optimize the behavior of TCP, and add application-specific optimizations to minimize the effect of high latency on common enterprise applications.

With Steelhead appliances, Riverbed customers experience significant benefits:

• Applications run up to 100 times faster. The acceleration of Exchange, Windows, FTP, HTTP, Notes and other key enterprise applications used on WANs dramatically improves collaboration, file sharing, and productivity.
• Redundant WAN traffic is eliminated, reducing bandwidth utilization by 60% to 95% on average. This enables network managers to delay or avoid WAN bandwidth upgrades, or even de-provision their current bandwidth.
• IT architects have the freedom to consolidate file servers, email servers, NAS, and tape libraries from remote offices to data centers – without degrading performance. Successful site consolidation can save millions in IT operating expenses.

“As more and more companies are moving toward distributed workforces, they recognize the need for Riverbed’s best-of-breed solution,” said Jerry M. Kennelly, CEO and president of Riverbed Technology. “If file transfer times can be cut from hours to minutes or even seconds, the ramifications for worker productivity are dramatic. Riverbed delivers this capability for the broadest set of applications and file types. Our Steelhead appliance is outpacing the competition on nearly every front. Customers recognize our value and are quick to select and deploy Steelhead once they see the impact on remote worker productivity.”

Riverbed Technology is the pioneer in wide area data services (WDS), a fast-growing product category that solves the problems of high latency and low bandwidth that plague a wide variety of applications over distributed networks. Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances provide the highest level of WAN performance at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO), reducing WAN traffic by up to 95% and accelerating applications by up to 100 times. By providing optimizations that are orders of magnitude greater than what users experience today, Riverbed is changing the way people work – and enabling, for the first time, a truly distributed workforce. InfoWorld named Steelhead a “Technology of the Year” for 2005 as the “Best WAN Accelerator.” Riverbed’s award winning solutions are available worldwide on their Steelhead appliances directly from Riverbed and as products available through global OEM partners, including HP. Riverbed has received funding from Accel Partners, Goldman Sachs, Lightspeed Venture Partners and UV Partners.

Riverbed Technology, Riverbed, Steelhead and the Riverbed logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc.

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For more information, visit www.riverbed.com.

Media contacts:                                                                             

Alan Saldich
Riverbed Technology  
(415) 247-7308 
alan@riverbed.com

Kim Kapustka
K2pr
(650) 685-6342
kim@k2pr.com

 

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