New models targeted at emerging markets, retail environments and small remote sites; entry price under $1,000

SAN FRANCISCO, May 3 — Riverbed Technology, the performance company, today announced new Steelhead models, the Steelhead 150 appliance and Virtual Steelhead 150, as part of its comprehensive wide area network (WAN) optimization product suite. With these additions to the Steelhead product family, businesses in emerging markets, retail customers, and governments and municipalities that have minimal bandwidth or few users at each location, as well as current customers who would like to extend the deployment to offices with fewer employees, can obtain a cost-effective solution that optimizes bandwidth and reduces remote infrastructure.

"Many enterprises have made their initial investments in WAN optimization to achieve branch office server consolidation and reduced WAN bandwidth costs," states Joe Skorupa, VP, Distinguished Analyst at Gartner Research. "However, the increasing use of dynamic browser-based applications like SharePoint and introduction of unified communications and collaboration applications and virtual desktops will require enterprises to evaluate and deploy acceleration technologies in a variety of sizes and form factors to achieve greater performance across their entire infrastructure."

The Riverbed Steelhead WAN optimization solution is leveraged by globally dispersed organizations to improve and accelerate application performance across the WAN while significantly reducing the amount of traffic on the network. WAN optimization enables distributed workforces to collaborate in real-time by providing LAN-like access to data and applications throughout the enterprise, including mobile workers, branch offices, data centers, and clouds. Enterprises utilizing Riverbed WAN optimization solutions have accelerated performance of many of the most commonly used applications across the network from 5-50 times, even up to 100 times in some cases, while streamlining operations, improving visibility, and reducing the costs of IT infrastructure.

Retail enterprises with thousands of locations, budget conscious governments and municipalities, and financial institutions that need to connect to their thousands of ATMs and rural branches that have just a few users at each location are all looking to WAN optimization to reduce their bandwidth and remote infrastructure costs. They need to reduce bandwidth costs for ongoing IT operations, while also improving collaboration and application response times. With the introduction of the new models these organizations will be able to deploy Steelhead appliances in the form factor most appropriate for their locations and needs.

In addition, the new Steelhead appliance models provide robust WAN optimization solutions for locations in emerging markets that require low-cost flexible deployment models.

Lastly, for organizations that have already deployed Steelhead appliances in their data centers and larger remote locations, the new models will allow them to further consolidate and virtualize their infrastructure by extending the speed and optimization benefits of WAN optimization to their smallest offices. The organization gets the control and security of centralized data while remote employees are able to download key applications and data without delay.

"Our new Steelhead appliances, both physical and virtual, provide vertical markets, such as retail, healthcare and even SMB organizations with a cost effective solution to reduce bandwidth utilization at remote locations," said John Martin, senior vice president of product management at Riverbed.

More than 17,000 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, edge virtual server infrastructure (edge-VSI), application-aware network performance management (NPM), application delivery, web content optimization (WCO), and cloud data protection for backup 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.

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.

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Source: Riverbed Technology