Riverbed Boosts its WAN Optimization for Hybrid Enterprise Clouds

Riverbed rolled out significant enhancements to its flagship products – Riverbed SteelHead 9.0 and Riverbed SteelCentral AppResponse 9.5 – with a focus on visibility, control, and optimization to accelerate performance of on-premises, cloud, and SaaS applications. The company sees enterprises moving rapidly to hybrid cloud architectures, where business traffic flows over both predictable WAN trunks and myriad Internet links between mobile users and their favorite cloud services. The new challenge is not only to handle congestion, but to ensure security, control and visibility of these new "Shadow IT" resources.

“Riverbed is now poised to do for cloud and SaaS applications what we’ve done for more than 1100 applications across the wide area network for the last decade,” said Jerry M. Kennelly, Riverbed Chairman and CEO, speaking at its Riverbed FORCE 2014 conference in San Jose, California.  

Riverbed customers have now deployed over 750,000 SteelHead appliances, giving the company a deeply embedded platform upon which to build further innovations in network management.

To accelerate the transition to global, hybrid enterprise networks, the company is also kicking off a Riverbed-Ready Technology Alliance program with 17 charter program members. Partners can leverage Riverbed open APIs and additional development tools to help with customization, integration, and automation.

Some highlights of the coming enhancements to the Riverbed platforms:

SteelHead 9.0 integrates with SteelCentral AppReponse 9.5 to provide visibility of on-premises, cloud, and SaaS apps.

• SteelCentral AppResponse 9.5 can measure end-user experience for both SteelHead-optimized and non-optimized enterprise web and SaaS applications for faster, more effective monitoring, and troubleshooting
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• SteelHead 9.0 can group applications according to their type and business priority to automate SLA activation for different types of apps.
   
• SteelHead 9.0 brings centralized, application-driven control of hybrid networks with “business intent”-based policies that make it easy to configure and manage path selection, quality of service (QoS), and secure transport.
   
• With Path Selection, SteelHead 9.0 intelligently derives all network paths and, based on business needs then prioritizes, secures and delivers business-critical applications over the fastest networks, while less critical applications are sent over the Internet. For example, Microsoft Lync voice traffic can be delivered over MPLS, while Lync video traffic is directed to the Internet.
  
• SteelHead 9.0 identifies over 1,100 applications – on-premises, cloud, and SaaS – which can be optimized for maximum productivity. Riverbed is rapidly expanding the number and type of applications that SteelHead recognizes, with a particular focus on SaaS apps.
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• Geo IQ for Microsoft Office 365 – The latest release of SteelHead 9.0 also offers Geo IQ for Microsoft Office 365, which ensures users are always connected to the native mailbox for optimal performance no matter where the Office 365 mailbox or the user is located.

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