San Francisco — January 19, 2006 — Riverbed Technology, Inc., the performance leader in wide-area data services (WDS), announced today that it has acquired more than five hundred customers in just over eighteen months of shipping its award-winning Steelhead® appliances, doubling its customer base in only six months. Along the way, Riverbed® has won more than 400 competitive "bake-offs" against competitors in the WAFS and WAN optimization market. Riverbed counts more than 20 of the Fortune 500 as its customers. Among its newest customers is Ruden McClosky in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

"The past 18 months have been a very exciting and fast-moving time for Riverbed," said Jerry Kennelly, president and CEO of Riverbed. "When we launched our Steelhead appliances in mid-2004, we provided the industry's most comprehensive solution that delivered the best performance for the widest range of applications. Since then we've worked with customers and prospects to add features and functionality that build on the industry's leading WDS solution and further distance us from the competition. We have grown as a company to more than 200 employees, with offices throughout North America, Europe and Asia. It's especially gratifying to see the company develop in so short a time."

In addition to the success Riverbed has enjoyed with customers, Steelhead appliances have been recognized in recent months by several technology and business publications as the leader in the space. The Wall Street Journal, InfoWorld, Electronic Times and Digital Times have all given awards to Riverbed and its Steelhead appliances. "The combination of Riverbed's technical leadership, customer success and industry recognition show that we are building a strong company, focused on providing distributed organizations with the solutions they need," said Kennelly.

Riverbed began shipping its WDS appliances in April of 2004; since then more than 3500 have been deployed, on every continent in the world and in virtually every vertical industry. Riverbed has customers today in financial services, publishing, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, insurance, energy, semiconductors, engineering, local and national governments, manufacturing, and architecture. Customers range in size from small organizations with only two or three offices, to some of the world's largest enterprises with hundreds or even thousands of offices.

"Riverbed is probably the fastest growing storage or networking company that I'm aware of," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst of the Enterprise Strategy Group. "It's been years since I've seen a company with this much market traction this quickly."

Ruden McClosky is one of the largest and fastest growing law firms in Florida. Since its beginnings as a Fort Lauderdale storefront in 1959, the firm has grown to approximately 200 attorneys (530 total staff) practicing in ten offices throughout Florida and Venezuela. Ruden McClosky has deployed seven Steelhead appliances in its larger remote sites. As part of its deployment, Ruden McClosky centralized its IT infrastructure, moving all application servers to a central data center and eliminating them from the remote offices.

"We were looking for a way to centralize the management of our systems infrastructure and still provide our end-users in remote offices with local-server performance ," said Ben Weinberger, IT director at Ruden McClosky. "We chose the Steelhead appliances for their ability to optimize a broad range of applications, including Microsoft SQL and Exchange. When we first tested Steelhead between our Fort Lauderdale office, which houses our primary data center, and our St. Petersburg, FL, office, we immediately saw a reduction in network traffic, including SQL and Exchange, of about 50% or so. Performance improved from the moment the Steelhead appliances were deployed."

Riverbed's award-winning Steelhead appliances are a new generation of IT infrastructure products from Riverbed 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 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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