Architecture for app performance

Sunaina Rana / Emirates Business

Riverbed was founded in 2002, shipped its first product (SteelHead) in 2004, went public in 2006 with the most successful IPO that year, surpassed US$1 billion in revenue in 2013 for the first time, and again in 2014 and 2015. The company now works with over 27,000 customers which includes 98 percent of the Forbes Global 100.
In April 2015, Riverbed delisted from the Nasdaq and went private, purchased by a consortium of investors led by Thoma Bravo, one of the most successful private equity firms in the US. The reason was to step away from public markets during a period of transition for Riverbed amid a time of disruption caused by the global digital transformation that is underway.
Emirates Business talks to Taj El Khayat, Regional Vice President, Middle East and Africa for Riverbed Technology, regarding the company’s presence in the Middle East.

Riverbed has expertise in so many fields. Can you name few of them?
Riverbed pioneered the high-speed delivery of applications over wide area networks (WANs) in 2004 with the launch of SteelHead, which continues as the market leader for 12 years and today it stands with more than 50-percent market share. So it’s no surprise that Riverbed continues to be known as the WAN optimisation company. But Riverbed is much more than WAN.
Today, Riverbed is the application performance company. We provide architecture for application performance that enables businesses to understand, optimise, simplify and protect their apps and data, even as app infrastructure becomes increasingly complex with apps coming from the cloud and from on-premises data centers, and running over the
Internet and private networks.
First, Riverbed enables end-to-end visibility so businesses can understand what is happening with with their apps and services at every stage, no matter how complex the underlying infrastructure.
The extent and depth of Riverbed performance monitoring generates big data, and we bring all this data together into tailored dashboards that bridge the traditional disconnect between business and IT.
Second, Riverbed delivers application-defined networking with our new SD-WAN solutions. Today’s networks are essentially the same as networks two decades ago: Hardware-bound, router-heavy, hard-coded. Networks with thousands of routers that have to be hand-programmed simply cannot support digital services with the speed and scale required. Riverbed SD-WAN transforms traditional networks into intelligent software-defined transport mechanisms designed and orchestrated by plain-language policies to deliver applications from anywhere to anywhere in the most efficient, optimized and secure way possible.
The SD-WAN market is expected to grow significantly in the coming years, from less than 1 percent penetration in branch offices today to about 30 percent in 2019.
Finally, application performance is all about the ‘edge’ — the branch offices and remote facilities where most employees work and where most business gets done. For example, take an international retailer that has hundreds of stores worldwide.
Having servers, data and apps at each branch that have to be installed and managed by non-IT personnel presents businesses with huge cost, performance, security and business continuity challenges. Riverbed solves this problem with a software-defined edge. Rather than physically installing infrastructure at the branch, it is all centralised in data centers on a hyper-converged infrastructure platform, under the expert management of IT pros.
With Riverbed Steel Fusion, branch employees get great application performance and the business gets much lower costs, faster agility, better data security, and guaranteed business continuity.

Please throw some light on your presence in Middle East region.
Riverbed entered the Middle East market in 2008 with the establishment of an office in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
From our regional hub in Dubai, we manage an extensive network of expertly enabled ‘focussed’ channel partners who serve enterprise and public sector customers across the Middle East, Turkey and Africa region.

Can you describe some of your biggest regional successes?
Since our establishment in the region, Riverbed has seen material growth. We have steadily grown our customer base which today includes a number of the region’s largest organizations from the government (defense and security), oil and gas, financial services, retail, aviation, education and enterprise sectors.
Today, the regional teams are focused on selling solutions across the Riverbed portfolio and will continue to build on this success by expanding our penetration into new industry verticals and growing our regional footprint in emerging markets. We adapt our strategy to regional trends and this year established specialist teams catering to the needs of the oil and gas and the Telecom verticals.
We are also very well recognised as a leading provider of network solutions in the region and have been awarded a number of industry honoursover the years including ‘Network Optimisation Vendor of the Year’ at the Network World Middle East Awards 2016 and the ‘Network Management Vendor of the Year’ awards at both the Network World Middle East Awards and the Network Middle East Innovation Awards in 2015. Finally, we have had a great deal of success in our partnership with our Technology Alliance Partners such as Microsoft and EMC. By creating a closer relationship with these partners, we have managed to increase our relevance in the local market.

What are your regional goals for the current year?
In the broadest sense, we are looking forward to help regional enterprises on their digital transformation journey as cloud infrastructures and hybrid networks become more software-defined. A prime object is therefore for us to offer customers our Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) solutions and architectures as part of Riverbed’s extensive product portfolio.
To achieve this, we will execute on a number of strategies. We intend to increase our focus on the Service Provider and Oil & Gas sectors in terms of solutions as well as reference architectures. With Telecom Providers in particular, we are keen to leverage a strategy which has worked particularly well for us in other markets such as Europe, which is to sell through the operators.
We will also aim to have more reseller and systems integrator partners who embed our technologies into their end-to-end solutions. This will mean working together with them to design the Riverbed Application Performance Platform into their reference architectures. Finally, we will continue to strengthen local ties with Riverbed Technology Alliance partners such as EMC, VMware and Microsoft to create more joint opportunities.