San Francisco — July 25, 2005 — Riverbed Technology, the performance leader in application acceleration on wide area networks, today announced the launch of its Riverbed Partner Network. The Riverbed Partner Network is a key component of Riverbed’s global go-to-market strategy as the company scales its sales organization to accommodate the exponential growth in demand for its wide-area data services (WDS) solutions. Riverbed recently announced its 200th customer in just over a year of shipping product. In Q2, 2005, the company doubled its customer base.

The Riverbed Partner Network is made up of the best networking and storage-oriented solution providers in the industry who Riverbed supports with tools, technical assistance, and people to facilitate business growth and overall success in selling Riverbed’s patented and groundbreaking WDS solutions.

”Every 10 years or so, a new product appears that revolutionizes how people work,” said Hayes Drumwright, president, Trace3. “Riverbed’s Steelhead is one of those technologies. It is one of the most incredible product lines that we’ve ever represented. Steelhead allows users on the WAN to experience LAN-like performance and it’s a massive cost saver. In addition, it’s simple to use and install. When we first heard the claims, we were incredulous. But then we saw the box in action and realized that it actually worked. The response from customers is often the same. When they see the box in action, the decision to buy is an easy one. We’re batting a thousand with Riverbed—we’ve come out ahead in every deal proposed with them.”

The Riverbed Partner Network program offers two levels of partnership: Certified and Premier. All partners who join the network start at the Certified level. As partners grow with Riverbed and achieve certain milestones, they can achieve Premier status, with additional support and compensation benefits.

Riverbed’s Steelhead™ appliance is the only WDS product on the market that solves all the key problems with application performance on wide area networks (WANs). These problems have been or are currently experienced by virtually every multi-site company in the world. The company’s Steelhead appliances deliver the industry’s best network compression, optimize the behavior of TCP, and add application-specific optimizations to minimize the effect of high latency on common enterprise applications.

“Customer demand for our field-tested and proven WDS solutions has created a tremendous opportunity for savvy channel partners” said Bertrand Yansouni, vice president of channel sales at Riverbed Technology. “In addition to delivering award-winning functionality to customers, Steelhead is a great product for the channel. Any organization with a remote office is a candidate, the product has a short sales cycle, and there is a high degree of repeat business. To capitalize on this opportunity, we are aggressively building out the Riverbed Partner Network. Riverbed’s Steelhead appliance offers real value to customers, as it solves the latency and bandwidth issues experienced by distributed enterprises. We are looking for a select group of partners who can help these organizations solve their remote office problems and truly take advantage of a distributed workforce.”

With Steelhead appliances, Riverbed customers experience significant benefits:

• Applications run up to 100 times faster. The acceleration of Exchange, Windows, FTP, HTTP, Notes, MS SQL and other key enterprise applications used on WANs dramatically improves collaboration, file sharing and productivity.
• Redundant WAN traffic is eliminated, reducing bandwidth utilization by 60% to 95% on average. This enables network managers to delay or avoid WAN bandwidth upgrades, or even de-provision their current bandwidth.
• IT architects have the freedom to consolidate file servers, email servers, NAS and tape libraries from remote offices to data centers – without degrading performance. Successful site consolidation can save millions in IT operating expenses.
• Organizations can now quickly and securely back up and replicate data across the WAN from systems that are hundreds, or even thousands of miles from the data center. This allows throughputs ranging between 500-700 Mbps, even on inter-continental links where round-trip latencies are well over several hundred milliseconds.

“We’ve evaluated several of the WDS solution providers and found that Riverbed offers the most comprehensive solution available today,” said Craig Sieve, partner at Foedus, a New Hampshire based solutions provider. “Our business is focused on improving infrastructure for our clients’ core business applications. At the same time, nearly all of our clients are looking to reduce costs and IT maintenance overhead. Until now, solving these competing issues has been nearly impossible. Now with Riverbed, we are able to simplify infrastructure at remote sites, while ensuring that end-users don’t experience slowdowns over the wide area network (WAN). Riverbed is the only solution we’ve seen that delivers the broad functionality that meets the demands of our diverse customer base.”

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 WAN performance at the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO), reducing WAN traffic by up to 95% and accelerating applications by up to 100 times. 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 truly distributed workforce. 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.

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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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