Evaluation based on completeness of vision and ability to execute

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 26 — Riverbed Technology, Inc., the IT performance company, announced today that it has been positioned by Gartner in the Leaders quadrant of the 2012 "Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers (WOC)" authored by Joe Skorupa and Severine Real and published in January 2012. According to Gartner, the report positions vendors in one of four quadrants — Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players — based on the companies' vision and ability to execute on that vision.

According to the report, "Leaders exhibit an ability to shape the market by introducing additional capabilities in their product offerings and by raising awareness of the importance of these features. We expect a Leader to grow the market as a whole and to have solutions that resonate with an increasing number of enterprises. Leaders in the WOC market need to have a broad feature set, including QoS, generic compression, protocol acceleration and file system acceleration, with the majority of features proved in substantial real-world implementations. They also need to be able to offer sales and support on a global basis."

"Riverbed is proud to be recognized as a leader in the WOC market by Gartner. We have long focused on addressing the needs of our enterprise customers by delivering world-class technology and providing the high-quality, fast-response support and services required by globally distributed organizations," said Eric Wolford, executive vice president and GM, products at Riverbed. "As we work closely with our customers on our product innovations, we're finding that there are several new technology frameworks that force their performance requirements to evolve, including the growth of cloud services models, new traffic types and the introduction of new computing platforms, such as tablets and mobile devices. As our customers adopt these new technology frameworks, Riverbed will continue to develop innovative solutions that meet the performance needs of the ever-changing enterprise."

A Company Laser-Focused on Continuously Driving Innovation

In today's data center-centric world, where workers are increasingly distributed, but IT is being centralized, solutions are needed that address the broad set of performance requirements necessary to truly virtualize and centralize IT, while ensuring end user performance. Over the last year Riverbed has substantially enhanced and grown its portfolio of solutions that address performance for the globally connected enterprise, including WAN optimization, virtual application delivery controllers (vADCs), application-aware network performance management (NPM) and cloud storage gateways.

"As organizations continue to build out the data center of the future, Riverbed will be there beside them to implement flexible architectures that allow them to bridge the gap between the data center and users and consumers at the edge," continued Wolford. "These solutions will provide seamless integration between the data center and globally distributed operations, allowing organizations to leverage their investment in the data center to their global operations."

Broadening Core Acceleration Capabilities to Meet the Needs of the Enterprise

In 2011, Riverbed introduced new features and capabilities to its Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) that broaden the company's support for key enterprise applications and extend its leadership in delivering speed, scale, simplicity and security to the globally connected enterprise. With RiOS 7.0, Riverbed expanded its already broad set of optimizations to include native support for hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) video, User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and IPv6, and has extended its existing optimizations for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Quality of Service (QoS), scale and security enhancements also provide organizations with greater control over business-critical applications.

Accelerating Public, Private and Hybrid Cloud Environments

Today's enterprises are increasingly adopting public cloud computing services to avoid costly infrastructure build-out, and to bring efficiency to business models such as software as a service (SaaS). As a result, business applications in the cloud, having once resided within the corporate network, are being accessed over an often unpredictable public Internet. In May 2011, Akamai and Riverbed announced their intention to develop a joint solution that leverages a combination of Internet optimization and wide area network (WAN) optimization to overcome the performance, availability, scalability and security issues introduced by this hybrid network environment. The solution is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2012.

Targeting the Needs of the Next-Generation Datacenter and the Future of Web Applications

Riverbed recently introduced its new portfolio of asymmetric software- and virtual-based offerings, including application delivery controllers (ADC), Web content optimization (WCO) and Web application firewalls. The new Stingray product family is enabling enterprises to migrate to, and receive the greatest benefits of, modern data center architectures by providing flexible application delivery across private and public clouds. The new products enable enterprises to host applications in any physical, virtual or cloud environment, and to cost-effectively scale application acceleration and optimization as needed, on-demand. The Stingray product family is based on technologies acquired from Zeus Technology and Aptimize Limited in July 2011.

Lead the Market Based on Revenue

Riverbed was identified as the Advanced Platform WAN optimization controller worldwide market share leader based on revenue for the first three reported quarters of 2011 by Gartner¹²³.

With its range of best-of-breed products, Riverbed can tailor the best possible approach to deliver performance from the application to the end user, creating a richer end-user experience, enabling more productive employees, and cutting the cost of IT infrastructure in the data center, cloud and branch office.

More than 16,000 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.

^1. Gartner, Inc., "Market Share: Application Acceleration Equipment, Worldwide, 1Q11" by Joe Skorupa and Nhat Pham, June 2011
^2. Gartner, Inc., "Market Share: Application Acceleration Equipment, Worldwide, 2Q11" by Joe Skorupa and Nhat Pham, September 2011
^3. Gartner, Inc., "Market Share: Application Acceleration Equipment, Worldwide, 3Q11" by Joe Skorupa and Nhat Pham, December 2011

About the Magic Quadrant

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Riverbed

Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) delivers performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and intelligently implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performance. By giving enterprises the platform they need to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns with the business needs of the organization. Additional information about Riverbed is available at www.riverbed.com.

-----

Source: Riverbed Technology, Inc.