San Francisco — October 25, 2005 — Riverbed Technology, the performance leader in application acceleration on wide area networks, today announced that The Wall Street Journal, the world’s leading business publication, has selected Riverbed® as the winner of its 2005 Technology Innovation Award in the Network/Broadband/Internet category. The awards recognize technological breakthroughs by individuals, companies and organizations around the world in a wide range of areas, including medicine, software, hardware, the Internet, wireless and broadcasting.

“Innovation is the key for any company to have continued success, and through these awards The Wall Street Journal recognizes these technological breakthroughs throughout the world,” said Karen Elliott House, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, and senior vice president, Dow Jones & Company. “This year’s winners showed the creative thinking that has allowed them to rise to the top of their respective industries.”

“This award is recognition of the unique and innovative approach that Riverbed has taken to solving the problems of application and service delivery performance over wide area networks,” said Jerry Kennelly, CEO and president of Riverbed Technology. “Our patented wide-area data services products solve real-world problems that enterprises face every day. Workforces are becoming more distributed, yet security and management concerns are driving IT toward centralization. Riverbed allows companies to reconcile these competing forces by delivering LAN-like performance over wide area networks.”

The Journal solicited nominations from all over the world through advertisements in the Journal and through the Innovation Awards website, www.dowjones.com/innovation. The Journal received some 750 applications from around two dozen countries. Applicants completed a rigorous form that requested extensive details relating to their entry and why it constituted a true innovation. Wall Street Journal editors then screened the applications and selected 104 semifinalists. Journal editors looked for innovativeness, clarity of explanation and whether the innovation was covered by patents or had achieved some kind of track record.

The winners were selected by an independent panel of esteemed judges from companies and organizations such as Sun Microsystems Labs, VMware Inc., Oxbridge Capital Ltd. and Xerox Corp. The judges considered these crucial factors, among others, in making their selections:

• Innovation should go well beyond what already exists and cannot simply represent incremental improvements.
• Innovations need to address major challenges for which new solutions would have a wide-ranging impact in a particular industry.
• The application needs to be supported by rigorous data rather than unsubstantiated claims of potential.

According to The Journal, Riverbed Technology won for its Steelhead® network appliances, which speed the transfer of data and use of applications between remote offices and central servers. As many corporate computer users know, when email, documents or spreadsheets are stored on a distant central computer, the wait to call up or change files can sometimes seem endless. Riverbed’s appliance reduces these delays by storing redundant commands and data on local severs, slashing the amount of traffic that goes back and forth over the network and increasing overall network speed.

The technology is a “clever solution to a universal problem that until now has not received a lot of attention,” says Diane Greene, co-founder and president, VMware, Inc. and one of the judges.

The award winners can be found in the print editions of The Wall Street Journal, The Wall Street Journal Asia and The Wall Street Journal Europe dated October 24, 2005. The winners can also be found online at www.wsj.com.

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 performance across the broadest range of applications over WANs, accelerating applications by up to 100 times, and reducing WAN traffic by up to 95%. 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 distributed workforce that can collaborate as if they were local. InfoWorld named Steelhead a “Technology of the Year” for 2005 as the “Best WAN Accelerator.” Riverbed’s award-winning solutions are available worldwide from resellers who are members of the Riverbed Partner Network, Riverbed OEM partners, or directly from Riverbed. 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. All other trademarks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.

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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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