San Francisco — January 4, 2006 — Riverbed Technology, the performance leader in wide-area data services (WDS), announced today that its Steelhead® appliances were selected by InfoWorld as the Best WAN Accelerator of 2006 for the second year in a row. InfoWorld established the WAN Accelerator category for this award in 2005, and has named Riverbed® the winner both years, each time awarding Steelhead appliances a rating of 9.0 out of a maximum of 10. Winners of the InfoWorld Technology of the Year Awards were drawn from all products tested by InfoWorld labs in 2005. According to InfoWorld, the "� annual Technology of the Year Awards identify significant technologies of the past year that promise to make the greatest impact on enterprise IT strategies, and honor the products that best exemplify the implementation of those technologies."

"Our annual awards highlight progress across nearly the entire enterprise IT landscape," said Steve Fox, InfoWorld's editor-in-chief. "InfoWorld's 2006 Technology of the Year Award winners represent the best products defining, and often redefining, the role of IT and resulting business impact."

"This award from InfoWorld is a reflection of the success Riverbed has enjoyed with customers since launching Steelhead appliances in April of 2004," said Jerry Kennelly, president and CEO of Riverbed. "In real-world tests, we beat out our competition on a daily basis. In only 19 months, Riverbed has well over 400 customers and more than 3,000 appliances deployed worldwide. InfoWorld launched its WAN Accelerator category last year and has chosen Steelhead as the category leader two years in a row. These results clearly show that Riverbed is dominating the market with the highest performance and most complete solution for distributed enterprises�despite facing competition from some of the largest networking companies in the world."

According to InfoWorld, "the networking technology that defined 2005 is traffic optimization. After all, few application-layer protocols were designed to run across the WAN, especially when they were developed with a certain monopoly OS in mind. The trick in most cases is to keep redundant requests on the local network, passing on only the meaningful parts of the TCP-level conversation."

InfoWorld reviewed the Steelhead model 3010 in November of 2005 and gave it a 9.0 rating for performance, protocol support, reliability, setup and value. The reviewers compared Steelhead appliances to other WAN optimization products and were impressed with the ease of installation, drawing special attention to the fact that unlike some competitors, Steelhead appliances don't require special connections or tunnels between boxes. The reviewers also praised the appliance's data storage, protocol optimization, and proxy file service capabilities.

The full recap of InfoWorld's 2005 product reviews and the Riverbed Steelhead review are available online at http://www.infoworld.com/reports/01SRtoy06.html.

Riverbed's Steelhead appliances are a new generation of IT infrastructure products that accelerate enterprise applications by up to 100 times between enterprise datacenters and remote offices. The Steelhead appliance's intelligent optimizations give companies that share data and collaborate between distributed offices the best performance for the widest range of applications, completely changing the way distributed IT is designed, deployed, used and managed.

Unlike competing approaches that are built primarily on either a network-compression or storage (caching) philosophy (like many WAFS-only architectures), Steelhead appliances are based on Riverbed's Universal Transport Acceleration (UTA) Architecture that optimizes bandwidth and latency for all TCP-based applications, including common applications like Windows file sharing, MAPI, Microsoft SQL and DPM, NetApp's SnapMirror, Symantec's NetBackup and FTP, while adding incremental application-specific latency optimizations to minimize the impact of latency on key applications.

Riverbed's intelligent optimizations also enable remote office IT consolidation, WAN bandwidth optimization and acceleration of data replication and backup.

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. 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. The Wall Street Journal named Riverbed the winner of its 2005 Technology Innovation Award in the Network/Broadband/Internet category. In addition, InfoWorld has named Steelhead a "Technology of the Year" in both 2005 and 2006, as the "Best WAN Accelerator". Riverbed's award-winning solutions are available worldwide from resellers who are members of the Riverbed Partner Network, from 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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