Riverbed continues to lead the WOC market with the broadest capabilities in WAN optimization, network and application performance monitoring, protocol analysis, remote server restoration, and remote storage acceleration. In December 2014, Riverbed was acquired by Thoma Bravo, the same private equity firm that took Blue Coat private in 2012. Riverbed and Blue Coat have different boards of directors, and the businesses should follow independent strategies. However, enterprises should seek confirmation of product road map details to ensure new features that are critical to their deployments are included. Riverbed supports a broad range of physical and virtual appliances, a subscription-based appliance, a mobile client and a high-capacity appliance for DC-to-DC. Since 2013, Riverbed's strategic goal has been to provide a closed-loop system for optimization, visibility and control across the entire enterprise, leading to an evolutionary approach to product enhancements and fewer new and innovative enhancements. Enhancements in 2014 included integration across all products into the Riverbed Application Performance Platform, which now combines SteelHead for WAN optimization, SteelFusion for branch office converged infrastructure, SteelCentral for performance monitoring and SteelScript for open APIs. Consider Riverbed for all enterprise WAN optimization projects.
Strengths
Riverbed offers the broadest set of capabilities in the industry, including features for large branch office networks, data center replication and storage networking protocols, and single remote users. Riverbed's SteelFusion appliance offers unique capabilities, allowing applications to remain distributed while storage is centralized. The combination of SteelHead and SteelCentral AppResponse provides very good visibility and reporting capabilities for drill-down reporting across networks, servers, applications, Web apps, pages, objects, sites and users (including end-user experience). The new Secure Transport feature supports an IPsec-encrypted overlay mesh network, and a partnership with Zscaler provides the ability to scan optimized traffic for security purposes before going to the cloud.
Cautions
Riverbed's price can be significantly higher than its leading competitors, and although it does respond when competitively challenged, its discount policies can be inflexible and inconsistent. Riverbed's portfolio has become extensive, with six product ranges and multiple products within each range, which can make it difficult to understand how to meet functional needs in a costefficient manner. Riverbed has been slow to embrace hybrid WANs, and its WAN path selection capabilities are rudimentary; they lack link quality assessment and performance-based forwarding capabilities, although these capabilities are planned for 4Q15. Gartner clients have reported that the solution can be difficult to manage in complex application environments, which can lead to misconfiguration and degraded application performance. However, Riverbed is adding autoconfiguration capabilities, and support is generally very responsive and highly rated by Gartner clients.
Strengths
Riverbed offers the broadest set of capabilities in the industry, including features for large branch office networks, data center replication and storage networking protocols, and single remote users. Riverbed's SteelFusion appliance offers unique capabilities, allowing applications to remain distributed while storage is centralized. The combination of SteelHead and SteelCentral AppResponse provides very good visibility and reporting capabilities for drill-down reporting across networks, servers, applications, Web apps, pages, objects, sites and users (including end-user experience). The new Secure Transport feature supports an IPsec-encrypted overlay mesh network, and a partnership with Zscaler provides the ability to scan optimized traffic for security purposes before going to the cloud.
Cautions
Riverbed's price can be significantly higher than its leading competitors, and although it does respond when competitively challenged, its discount policies can be inflexible and inconsistent. Riverbed's portfolio has become extensive, with six product ranges and multiple products within each range, which can make it difficult to understand how to meet functional needs in a costefficient manner. Riverbed has been slow to embrace hybrid WANs, and its WAN path selection capabilities are rudimentary; they lack link quality assessment and performance-based forwarding capabilities, although these capabilities are planned for 4Q15. Gartner clients have reported that the solution can be difficult to manage in complex application environments, which can lead to misconfiguration and degraded application performance. However, Riverbed is adding autoconfiguration capabilities, and support is generally very responsive and highly rated by Gartner clients.