BANGALORE, INDIA: In this time of downturn, everyone is trying to do more with less. And particularly, the challenge for the CIOs these days is that their requirements are increasing but the budget is less. Hence there is a need to manage more with what you already have, and by spending less money than what you previously were able to.

The market for WAN optimization is fast becoming more mainstream, with enterprises seeking to deploy more robust infrastructure and reduce costs via consolidation, improve end-user productivity, and leverage technology to streamline business processes.

While industries world over across verticals are going through the above situation, Riverbed, the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), says it has has good news and is looking forward to an interesting times this year.

“According to a recent CIO-level IT spending survey by Goldman Sachs, WAN optimization, along with virtualization, has come out as one of the top three priorities for global CIOs this year,” revealed Robert Healey, marketing evangelist, APAC & Japan, Riverbed. “We hope to see these CIOs spending well this year.”

“The benefits Riverbed brings is an order of  magnitude of performance management for your storage, network and applications when you look at other two top priorities in the survey – server virtualization and storage virtualiztion,” he adds.

“Everyone is trying to do virtualization, consolidation and Green IT. These initiatives contribute to reducing costs but doesn't help improve the performance. In an open source, it doesn't necessarily give you that massive boost of performance which is really required in this cost-driven era. That's where Riverbed helps you achieve this,” says Healey.  “Even the service provider customers are demanding more visibility, reporting and analytics capabilities from us,” he adds.

“Virtualization is good, but it also creates enormous amounts of data, and that data needs to move across a wide area network (WAN). So, our technology is complementary if not a mandatory part of any kind of virtualization programme these days,” he adds.  Hence, Riverbed has got into technical alliances with major virtualization players including the VMWare and Microsoft.

Healey says, “Virtualization really  is about saving costs on your infrastructure. But there is a performance impact. The opportunity is certainly there for acceleration technology to complement virtualization and consolidation issues.”

Talking of increasing awareness on WAN optimization, he says, “We see that the awareness and acceptance of the uptake of technology varies from country to country more significantly. Domestically as well as internationally, WAN optimization is being very very rapidly accepted. When you look at Australia, China and India, there are number of similarities. The geographies are large, they got long distance connections which have high latency. In addition, the network bandwidth from the providers is not usually very high. Looking at the geographies, Riverbed's products and technologies are perfect for those environments.”