Today, Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the performance company, announced that Randy Schirman, senior vice president of worldwide channel sales, has been named one of CRN’s 2012 Channel Chiefs. This prestigious list of the most influential and powerful leaders in the IT industry recognizes those executives directly responsible for driving channel sales and growth within their organizations, while evangelizing and defending the importance of the channel throughout the entire IT industry.

SAN FRANCISCO—March 12, 2012— Schirman was named a 2012 Channel Chief for leading the global channel sales strategy at Riverbed®, which resulted in increased business through the channel in 2011. Major accomplishments that drove this growth include Schirman’s efforts to expand the Riverbed channel with cloud service providers, solutions partners, and OEMs – additional partners that deliver a comprehensive solution to help enterprise customers realize the benefits of the cloud. Schirman also led the channel integration of Aptimize and Zeus Technology, which were acquired by Riverbed in July 2011, further enabling Riverbed channel partners to deliver performance to meet customers’ IT needs.

“Riverbed has evolved significantly in the last three years from a one-product company to now offering a broad solutions portfolio and a comprehensive performance platform,” said Schirman. “In 2011, Riverbed made significant enhancements to our partner program, further globalizing the program and offering new opportunities for partners to solve customers’ complex IT problems. This year, we will continue to invest in programs, tools, and technology solutions to make it easier for partners to support their customers’ IT initiatives.”

“We congratulate Randy on receiving this recognition for the second year in row. It is a testament to the success that Riverbed channel partners have had in bringing strategic value towards addressing customers’ IT performance needs,” said Dave Peranich, executive vice president of global worldwide field operations at Riverbed. “Our channel partners helped propel Riverbed WAN optimization solutions to capture more than 50% market share in the WAN optimization controller market - a further indicator of the strength of the Riverbed Partner Network.”

For the ninth consecutive year, Channel Chiefs were selected by the CRN editorial team based on channel experience, program innovations, channel-driven revenue, and public support for the importance of IT Channel Sales.

“The 2012 Channel Chiefs list recognizes vendor executives dedicated to driving channel programs in the IT marketplace,” said Kelley Damore, vice president, editorial director for UBM Channel. “Our annual Channel Chiefs issue is a must-read for IT solution providers evaluating new vendors or looking to expand solution offerings. These are the people, the products and the programs that any savvy solution provider needs to know. We congratulate this year’s Channel Chiefs for their stellar record of business innovation applaud them for their continued dedication to the partner community.”

The Riverbed Partner Network is a comprehensive program designed to provide growth and profitability for each type and size of Riverbed partner, including global partners, large account resellers, as well as enterprise and small/medium enterprise solution providers. It is a compelling platform for partners to drive their organization's growth by utilizing new lead generation, training and certification, and sales incentive programs that drive success both for the partners and their customers.

More than 17,000 organizations worldwide depend on Riverbed to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT infrastructure, through solutions that overcome performance issues caused by distance, distributed computing, and ever increasing amounts of data. As IT organizations embark on strategic initiatives to virtualize, consolidate and migrate workloads into cloud environments, users are moved farther from their data, and slow applications, file transfers and inefficient websites negatively impact the performance of these initiatives. Riverbed transforms IT performance by providing solutions spanning WAN optimization, application-aware NPM, application delivery, web content optimization (WCO), and cloud data protection for backup, archive and disaster recovery. By providing the broadest portfolio of performance solutions that deliver anywhere, any application optimization, Riverbed enables organizations to increase productivity and efficiency, while enhancing business resilience and controlling costs.

Selected by CRN's editorial staff, the 2012 Channel Chiefs list is featured in the February issue of CRN Magazine and will be featured online at www.crn.com.

Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed's products and services, statements regarding performance results of Cascade solutions that may suggest likely or certain outcomes, and statements relating to Riverbed’s ability to meet the needs of distributed organizations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; our ability to anticipate market needs or develop new or enhanced products to meet those needs; the adoption rate of our products; our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our distribution partners; our ability to compete in our industry; fluctuations in demand, sales cycles and prices for our products and services; shortages or price fluctuations in our supply chain; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Riverbed’s business are set forth in our Form 10-K filed with the SEC on February 10, 2012. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Any future product, feature or related specification that may be referenced in this release are for information purposes only and are not commitments to deliver any technology or enhancement. Riverbed reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time.