Riverbed leader in WOC advanced platform market

BANGALORE, INDIA: Riverbed Technology, provider of wide-area data services (WDS), has announced that Gartner has identified the company in its recently announced report, "Market Share: Application Acceleration Equipment, Worldwide 4Q07 and 2007"1 as the WOC (WAN optimization controller) Advanced Platform worldwide market share leader for 4Q 2007 and CY 2007 based on revenue.

According to Gartner’s market share report, Riverbed sustained strong growth to maintain its lead with 29% share. This is the 6th quarter in a row that Riverbed has maintained the leadership position in the WOC Advanced Platform category.

“Acceleration is the cornerstone of our market, called “WOC Advanced Platform” by Gartner and WDS by Riverbed,” said Eric Wolford, senior vice president, marketing and business development at Riverbed. “When customers come to Riverbed, they are looking for an easy-to-install and manage WDS solution that speeds application performance and data transfer download times for their distributed employees, including remote offices and mobile workers.

Our belief that speed is the core requirement is supported by our continued market share leadership in the WOC Advanced Platform product category, and our over 3500 customers worldwide.”

For remote offices and data centers, Riverbed offers its Steelhead® appliance product family. Steelhead appliances deliver enterprise-class WDS that scales across a range of applications and network topologies to accelerate applications by up to 100 times. For the growing mobile workforce, Riverbed introduced its Steelhead Mobile software client, which is intended to deliver LAN-like application performance to any employee, whether on the road, working from home or connected wirelessly in the office. 

In February 2008, Riverbed extended its technology and product lead with the announcement of the 5.0 version of the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS™), which powers the Riverbed Steelhead product line. With RiOS 5.0, Riverbed is the first and only vendor to provide application-level protocol optimization for Microsoft Exchange 2000, 2003 and 2007. In addition, Riverbed has extended its lead in delivering solutions to enhance IT flexibility and capabilities with new scale, simplicity and security features, including the RiOS Services Platform (RSP), an extensible data services platform that enables the delivery of virtualized edge services without the need to deploy additional physical servers at remote or branch offices.

The RSP allows customers to deploy best-of-breed services from their choice of vendors on Steelhead appliances in a self-contained partition to minimize the hardware infrastructure footprint at the branch office. In a typical RSP-enabled deployment of Steelhead appliances, IT infrastructure at the remote site can often be reduced to an RSP-enabled Steelhead appliance and a router, reducing costs and minimizing IT overhead.

“While speed is the highly-valued anchor tenant in remote offices and a core requirement for customers in the WOC Advanced Platform category, there is demand for other services such as Web-proxy,  DNS/DHCP/IPAM, streaming video, unified threat management (UTM), virtual machines, and print, but it is fragmented among the array of other edge services desired.  By offering an open WDS platform, like RSP, Riverbedmatches the customer need for acceleration with the best-of-breed services they require.” said Wolford.