With all the excitement of the games in Rio currently underway I just can’t help but to think of what type of competitions can be created for tech minded folk. The really old server hiding in the back closet that is so old that the PC recycling place won’t even take it dead weight lift, water polo where instead of a ball you use whatever useless piece of squishy marketing giveaways you received at your last tech conference or my favorite, sharpshooting old hard drives. Imagine heading back to the office with 20+ gold medals; that would be pretty darn cool. I would imagine that the gold medals in the Technology Summer Games would be USB 3.0 compatible, to store the pictures of you on the podium accepting your gold medals of course.
Let’s switch gears here a little and project that the Technology Summer Games are based on a company vs. company competition. The next facet would be basing the technology events on different technology disciplines. Let’s pick my favorite, Wide Area Networks (WAN). WAN is then broken down into four distinct categories.
- Best WAN Optimization product
- Best WAN Branch IT Reduction product
- Best WAN Network and Application Monitoring Product
- Best SD-WAN Product*
*New to the games this year
Who’s bringing home the gold?
In order to answer that question let’s look at who has been leading the pack coming into the Technology Summer Games. Riverbed has been named a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant in WAN optimization for the last nine consecutive years. Riverbed is the company that pioneered WAN optimization and continues to innovative and lead the WAN optimization market with their SteelHead product line. I would say SteelHead is coming into the Technology Summer Games as a clear gold medal favorite.
Riverbed is also coming into the games with the best Zero-IT branch solution in the marketplace, SteelFusion. SteelFusion provides the technology that enables branch offices to operate without the costly infrastructure and associated technical support that is traditional with remote locations. With SteelFusion, the branch office can work on WAN delivered technologies directly from their LAN. This is done by virtually delivering technologies running at data centers or corporate offices to the SteelFusion product located at the branch office. Another clear gold medal favorite.
SteelCentral tops the marketplace in the ability to deep dive into both network and application performance monitoring practically knocking the competition out of the water. Like its sibling SteelHead, SteelCentral has also been in the Gartner rankings. Over the last three years SteelCentral has been a leader in Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics. And yes you guessed it, another gold medal favorite.
The last category is the new event that is sure to be a crowd favorite, SD-WAN. While the judges are still figuring out exactly what this event is and how to judge it, Riverbed has been training morning, noon and night to create the best SD-WAN solution in the marketplace, SteelConnect. With SteelConnect you can easily design, deploy and administer an integrated line of WAN gateways, remote LAN switches and Wi-Fi access points from an intuitive centrally managed cloud console. With its gold medal teammates and countless training hours SteelConnect not only will bring home the gold, it will be standing room only at the medal ceremony.
Go for the gold, go with Riverbed.
For more information on WAN Optimization rankings by Gartner
For more information on Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics rankings by Gartner:
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