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WAN optimization addictive for enterprises

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CIOL Bureau
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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.

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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.”

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“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.

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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.”

 

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Indian scenario

“Adoption of WAN optimization in India is quite similar to the Australian market. India has a very technology-savvy audience. Riverbed had a great deal of success in selling to Indian organizations. We also have a number of major deals in progress here right now. The Indian market has a reasonable awareness of the technology. Considering the geography and the service environment, the requirement and the benefits of our products is quite high here,” says Healey.

Riverbed is present in India for the last two and a half years, during which time, it has been able to garner more than 300 big customers. “We continue to grow our business in a very rapid rate in this market., particularly in Bangalore.  As the technology becomes better understood and accepted, these days customers are designing their new network infrastructure with WAN optimization as a mandatory requirement. Unaccelerated performance is not simply acceptable, it is highly intolerable these days. This technology is very addictive,” he says.

“From the experience with our customers, we see WAN optimization is becoming virtually mandatory along with other top 10 or 20 initiatives. It basically makes everything work so much better. So, virtually for any major IT initiative, CIOs these days really should consider WAN acceleration technology,” Healey adds.

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Way forward for Riverbed

Riverbed works around the principle of two key messages - “Do More With Less” or “Do More With What You Got”, says Healey.

In the fourth quarter of 2008, Riverbed closed more than 500 accounts globally across industry verticals including the government sector. Riverbed has a tradition of releasing two to three products every year. “The third quarter in 2008 was actually the busiest one in our company's history. We released Version 5.5 of RiOS (Riverbed Optimization System) and did a lot of work in the integration with network management and monitoring partners, and also rolled out new hardware platforms including the new RiOS services platform. The pace of our innovation continues through out 2009,” says Healey.

Explaining further, he says, “We have recently redesigned our products. Our products are all about speed.” Riverbed offers a truly revolutionary technology - which is relatively cheap and very simple to deploy and makes what was previously thought impossible to be able to achieved, he added.