SAN FRANCISCO – March 29, 2018 – Riverbed®, The Digital Performance Company™, today announced it has attained a gold application development competency, demonstrating a “best-in-class” ability and commitment to meet Microsoft Corp. customers’ evolving needs in today’s cloud-first and digital world and distinguishing itself within Microsoft’s partner ecosystem.

To earn a Microsoft gold competency, partners must successfully complete exams (resulting in Microsoft Certified Professionals) to prove their level of technology expertise, and then designate these certified professionals uniquely to one Microsoft competency, ensuring a certain level of staffing capacity. They also must submit customer references that demonstrate successful projects, meet a performance (revenue and or consumption/usage) commitment, and pass technology and/or sales assessments.

Read Blog: Riverbed’s Microsoft Gold Application Development Competency – a Closer Look at SteelCentral Aternity  

Riverbed and Microsoft have had a longstanding partnership to provide users with fast and secure access to applications and data, wherever it resides, including delivering optimization and visibility for cloud applications such as Office 365 and platforms like Azure, and with SD-WAN SteelConnect, Riverbed enables instant connectivity to Azure. The Microsoft gold competency in application development follows a cloud platform competency last year, furthering Riverbed’s commitment to meeting Microsoft’s cloud-first mission, and delivering joint solutions for customers.

Riverbed’s digital performance solutions are designed to provide a modern IT architecture necessary to maximize digital performance and drive business success for customers. The gold competency tied to application development leverages Riverbed’s SteelCentral digital experience management solution, which provides complete and integrated visibility into end-user experience, application, network and infrastructure performance, across any device, physical or virtual network and application hosting environment that is on or off the cloud.

“Our mutual customers require exceptional performance of their business critical applications. Riverbed’s new gold competency in application development demonstrates that we have the knowledge, expertise, and commitment to assure the delivery of an excellent digital experience for those applications on Azure,” said Mike Sargent, Riverbed Senior Vice President and General Manager, SteelCentral. “We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Microsoft in serving as trusted technology advisors and delivering dramatic business impact.”

“By achieving a Gold competency, partners have demonstrated the highest, most consistent capability and commitment to the latest Microsoft technology,” said Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president, One Commercial Partner at Microsoft Corp. “These partners have a deep expertise that puts them in the top of our partner ecosystem, and their proficiency will help customers drive innovative solutions.”

Earning the Application Development competency helps partners differentiate themselves as a trusted expert to their customers through development and deployment of commercial or custom applications built using core Microsoft technologies like Windows Server and Windows 8 operating systems, the Windows Azure platform, Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 development system and emerging cloud-based and web business models. By gaining access to a comprehensive set of benefits through the Application Development competency, partners can help customers be more productive and profitable through deployment of business applications, advanced web portals or rich client user interfaces that run on premises or in the cloud.

The Microsoft Partner Network helps partners strengthen their capabilities to showcase leadership in the marketplace on the latest technology, to better serve customers and to easily connect with one of the most active, diverse networks in the world.