Virtualisation Technologies Drive Riverbed to More Business

Today, with large volumes and new varieties of data such as videos and multimedia - traveling thousands of kilometers for routine business needs, Indian multinationals are looking for faster and smarter network connectivity. These developments make India a very exciting market for firms working in Network Performance Management, such as Riverbed Technology.

What is the impact of big data and virtualization on the enterprises?

This is an interesting time in terms of the IT trends and the overall development of technology. I think there is a lot going on at a very high level, you can say the big trends are taking place; there is social networking, there is BYOD, the SDN and the SDDC, obviously virtualization and the cloud; and all we are in the middle of emergence of Big Data. At a high level, these are all the major IT industry trends.

And, each one of these has an impact on enterprises, IT architectures service providers and IT vendor offerings as well. There is the overall growth of these major IT trends. Virtualization, over the last 10 years, has completely transformed enterprise IT and that transformation continues to progress. So, instead of having one big physical machine, you can have three or four virtual machines. That's nice, but if you have got too many people creating their own virtualization infrastructure, suddenly you have 20 and then you lose the cost efficiency through the virtualization. In addition to which making virtual machines everywhere creates more data. That data needs to be managed, backed up, moved across the networks and so on. So, virtualization is having a really big impact on the networking infrastructure in order to support it.

How has Riverbed evolved from being a WAN acceleration provider?

Today, Riverbed has 22,000 customers and 94 percent of those are Fortune 100 companies. We originally started with WAN acceleration with the Steelhead appliances but we have now branched out into a number of other areas. Riverbed now sells Performance Platform (PP), which consists of performance management to understand what's out there, who is using it, how is it working, how do we need to fix it. There are four different technology assistants that address the performance problems inside enterprise and IT service providers. PP makes IT people happy, with everything smooth, fast, no angry phone calls. It also makes users happy, reliable and provides high speed. From a competitor stand point, the breadth of our portfolio in terms of visibility, control, overall performance and so on is unmatched by any other vendor. Particularly, the Granite and the Whitewater products, Riverbed is the only company in the world that has this tech. Steelhead does WAN acceleration. Granite products is the storage delivery platform, which allows you to consolidate your distributed storage infrastructure. Granite device can project storage devices out from the data centers to make look and feel it is in the branch office, but it is all in the data centers secure and safe, and easily backed up. Whitewater is the cloud storage gateway.

How do you see the WAN optimization market, in India and globally?

Globally, WAN optimization technology has been there for 10 years. While its becoming more mature, it has a great deal of scope for expansion and development. Some of the innovations that Riverbed has done include the path selection for hybrid networking. One of the big shifts that we are seeing is, despite what the service providers want, bandwidth is becoming cheaper and more available, slowly but it is happening. That combined with the shift, cloud based software applications like Microsoft office 365. What we see there is a shift from the traditional hub, enterprise IT architecture where every branch has one connection, its one low bandwidth, high cost can be a less circuit back to the headquarters and there is only one Internet gateway through the whole, the company, which is from the headquarters data centers. Now, we are seeing more of the direct to net, branch office connectivity. With our Steelhead appliance, we are uniquenly positioned to tap the market.

How do you compare the India market with others?

In terms of our revenue split, I think Riverbed is probably fairly similar when compared to most of the IT vendors in relation to the proportion of revenues that comes from the various geographies. I think our numbers are in line with other major IT vendors such as Cisco, F5, Juniper, VMware, etc. Our products and technology have a very strong appeal in this region because there are so many major enterprises like the Indian banks or the Department of Posts, which may have 10,000 branches. I think the Indian market has great deal of potential. Riverbed is investing in people and expanding our presence here, building infrastructure and the business results are coming as the result of that.