Riverbed Stands Alone in Leaders Quadrant for WAN

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - May 10, 2013) - Riverbed Technology ( NASDAQ : RVBD ), the application performance company, today announced that the company has been positioned by Gartner in the Leaders Quadrant of the 2013 "Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers" authored by Joe Skorupa, Mark Fabbi, Bjarne Munch and published in April 2013. Riverbed® is the only vendor in the Leaders Quadrant in the most recent report and has been named to the Leaders Quadrant for the sixth consecutive time. According to Gartner, this 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. The entire report can be viewed here: http://www.riverbed.com/about/document-reposi...-2013.html .

According to the report, "Current innovation is on form factors and platforms with WAN optimization migrating toward powerful branch office platforms or to an optimized WAN cloud." Further, "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 must 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."

"The rate and pace of change in enterprise IT has grown exponentially over the last few years," said Eric Wolford, president products group at Riverbed. "New IT architectures and shifts in business structure such as cloud computing, virtualization, software defined data centers, mobility and the consumerization of IT create opportunities for the business and new challenges for the CIO. Many of our customers are finding that WAN optimization is at the heart of enabling these new approaches without sacrificing performance. With our breadth and depth of optimizations and form factors, our customers rely on Riverbed as a strategic partner for ensuring application performance."

Hyperconvergence Requires Organizations to Rethink Network with Performance in Mind The urgent and disruptive trends that IT face today are what many thought leaders are calling hyperconvergence. Cloud, mobility, SaaS, collaboration and other trends are simultaneously placing new demands on organizations, forcing them to rethink the way they approach network design, architecture and sourcing. As IT organizations plan technology deployments, it is critical to understand the impact hyperconvergence will have on performance of applications over the wide area network (WAN). This trend is indicative of growing demand for WAN optimization solutions.

2012 Enhancements that increased Application Performance for Global Organizations Riverbed continues to deliver application performance solutions to meet the ever-changing needs of global organizations, regardless of where an employee or data is located. The family of Riverbed WAN optimization solutions come in a variety of form factors, including, physical, cloud edition, virtual edition and mobile, to enable organizations to deliver unmatched performance for large-scale data center-to-data center replication, "local" performance for remote and mobile workers, and acceleration for consolidated, cloud and virtualized environments. To meet customer demands Riverbed introduced new and enhanced products to address the growing demands of the global enterprise:

• The Steelhead CX 5055 model appliance and the Steelhead CX 7055 model appliance  enable enterprises to more cost-effectively manage large-scale data center-to-data center replication and build large private cloud infrastructures.
• Steelhead integration with Riverbed Granite®  enables organizations to create a powerful branch office platform that enables greater consolidation of branch infrastructure to the secure data center. This integration enables complete edge server and storage consolidation in the data center possible for the first time while still ensuring an accelerated and reliable end-user experience, even in the case of a WAN outage. Organizations are able to increase control over their entire IT infrastructure and reduce operational burdens, and create new possibilities for IT, including instant provisioning of branch offices from the data center and instant restore should disaster occur. This approach improves security, data protection, and performance, all while reducing the total cost of ownership of branch infrastructure.
• The integration of VMware vSphere® into the Steelhead® EX model appliances  provides organizations with a single platform for simplified, centralized management of distributed virtual services. When combined with award-winning  Granite storage delivery solutions , organizations can consolidate edge data to the secure data center, while delivering local performance access to branch employees.
• The Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) 8.0 , the software that powers Steelhead appliances, enables organizations to prioritize more than 600 applications based on the business needs, and also includes QoS for PCoIP traffic.
• Steelhead Mobile 4.0 simplifies the management and provisioning of mobile users and devices and can now support up to 120,000 concurrent mobile users. Steelhead Mobile 4.0 also offers end-to-end Kerberos authentication support used by Microsoft applications and platforms including Active Directory and Windows Server, native optimization for SMBv2 traffic, and full-spectrum optimization for Outlook Anywhere.
• Riverbed partnered with Juniper Networks to deliver best-in-class WAN optimization solutions, including plans to integrate Steelhead Mobile technology into the Juniper Networks® Junos® Pulse client to provide a mobile acceleration solution for mobile phones and tablets.
• Cloud Steelhead extends Riverbed WAN optimization to a solution purpose-built for cloud computing environments by including cloud-intelligent features like transparent interception and a portal-based management system. When combined with the elasticity and subscription pricing model of AWS, organizations can easily install and scale within Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) environments.

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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.

Forward Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed's products and services. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; our ability to anticipate market needs or develop new or enhanced products to meet those needs; the adoption rate of our products; our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our distribution partners; our ability to compete in our industry; fluctuations in demand, sales cycles and prices for our products and services; shortages or price fluctuations in our supply chain; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Riverbed's business are set forth in our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on May 3, 2013. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Any future product, feature or related specification that may be referenced in this release are for information purposes only and are not commitments to deliver any technology or enhancement. Riverbed reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time.

About Riverbed Riverbed delivers application 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 ( NASDAQ : RVBD ) is available at www.riverbed.com .

Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service name or logo used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners.