SAN FRANCISCO — January 6, 2005— Riverbed™ Technology, the pioneer in wide area application acceleration , announced today that its Steelhead appliance was named 2004 Product of the Year by InfoWorld in the networking category. The product also received the highest rating from the magazine among all accelerator and load balancer products reviewed in 2004. InfoWorld recently recapped all the reviews it conducted last year showing Riverbed received the highest score. Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances earned a 9.0 rating out of a maximum of 10 in the publication’s April 9 issue.

“The fact that Riverbed’s product scored the highest in its category for the entire year comes as no surprise to us,” said Jerry Kennelly, CEO, Riverbed Technology. “We stand behind the performance of our product, and the prestigious recognition from InfoWorld backs up what we’ve known for a long time. Steelhead improves application performance over wide area networks by up to 100 times. Our competitors can’t even come close to these performance figures.”

InfoWorld reviewed the Steelhead 2000 model prior to the product being generally available. In the test, the Steelhead appliance was able to reduce the time it took to FTP an eight-megabyte PDF file over a wide area network from 25 minutes to 12 seconds, a 125x improvement. Other products reviewed were from Tacit Networks, Coyote Point Systems, NetScaler, Redline Networks and Stampede Technologies. Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances not only received the highest score in this category but was the only networking product out of 44 reviewed to score 9.0 or higher. Other networking categories included media networking, network management, routers and switches and wireless.

Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances speed up application performance over distributed networks for the core applications used by enterprises to conduct every-day business activities such as email systems like Exchange® and Notes®, file access, backup, and Web-based business applications like ERP and CRM. The Steelhead appliances solve both the limited bandwidth and high latency issues associated with moving all types of data over a WAN. The appliances use a combination of patent-pending techniques that eliminate the need for caching, accelerate both transport protocols (TCP) and application protocols (like CIFS and MAPI), and pre-populate edge appliances with data in order to reduce the transfer time from hours or minutes to seconds.

The full recap of InfoWorld’s 2004 product reviews and the Riverbed Steelhead review is available online at http://www.infoworld.com.

Riverbed Technology develops solutions to accelerate application performance on wide area networks, and to enable enterprises to simplify and consolidate their IT infrastructure without compromising local application performance. Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances make the most commonly used distributed systems running across the wide area network (WAN) perform up to 100 times faster. Riverbed was founded in 2002 by CEO Jerry M. Kennelly and chief technology officer Dr. Steve McCanne, a visionary recently identified by M.I.T.’s Technology Review as one of the top 100 young innovators in the world. Riverbed has received funding from Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and UV Partners, and has an engineering team that includes veterans from Microsoft, Inktomi, and Network Appliance. For more information, visit www.riverbed.com.

###

For more information, visit www.riverbed.com.
 
Media contact:
Alan Saldich
Riverbed Technology
(415) 247-7308
alan@riverbed.com

Jodi Olson
Text 100 Public Relations
(415) 593-8453
jodio@text100.com

 

« Back to Press