STUDY FINDS MOST ENTERPRISES PLAN TO INVEST IN SOLVING REMOTE SITE PERFORMANCE PROBLEMS FOR A WIDE RANGE OF APPLICATIONS
Data Consolidation, Cost, and Complexity are the Major Drivers
San Francisco — May 9, 2005— In a recently commissioned study completed by Forrester Consulting for Riverbed Technology, nearly 70% of enterprise IT managers surveyed have plans for projects to address remote site performance problems. The top five application drivers were web applications, access to file servers and storage, email/messaging, database, and ERP applications. Of more than 200 companies surveyed by Forrester Consulting, 80% had either consolidated their remote office infrastructure already, or were planning to do so within the coming year. The leading types of remote office IT infrastructure being considered for site consolidation were file servers, Exchange servers and tape auto-loaders or other remote office backup systems. More than 70% of companies had plans to consolidate Exchange servers within the coming year, while 55% had plans to consolidate their remote office tape backup equipment.
In addition, according to Forrester Research’s Principal Analyst, Thomas Mendel in his own research of 67 enterprise infrastructure managers surveyed over the last 12 months, the top five issues companies are currently struggling with: 1) consistent end-to-end application and service performance guarantees; 2) unplanned infrastructure changes resulting in incidents and downtime; 3) unanticipated infrastructure consequences of consolidation and new application projects; 4) mis-configuration of network objects; and 5) wide area network performance. .
“The study results from Forrester Consulting are enlightening and consistent with the feedback we receive from customers,” said Eric Wolford, Vice President of Marketing at Riverbed. “In our experience as with Forrester’s own research, only about 15% of the market is interested in a single application. 85% of the market is compelled by multiple application drivers. Our products are ideally positioned to deliver on the vision of making remote office performance feel local.”
The key drivers for site consolidation were simpler IT management and cost cutting. By consolidating infrastructure, enterprises can reduce the outsourced or in-house IT staff required to support the equipment, and they can simplify their enterprise networks and associated infrastructure. Unlike products built on a caching architecture that support the consolidation of only one type of infrastructure (i.e. file servers), with Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances, enterprise customers can consolidate servers, storage, Exchange servers, Notes servers and tape backup equipment.
About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology, the pioneer in wide area application acceleration, was founded in 2002 by Jerry M. Kennelly, President and CEO, and chief technology officer Dr. Steve McCanne. Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances were named a “Product of the Year” for 2005 by InfoWorld in the networking category, as the “Best WAN Accelerator”. Steelhead appliances solve the problems of latency and bandwidth that plague a wide variety of applications over distributed networks. The company has received funding from Goldman Sachs, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and UV Partners.
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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
