Riverbed releases results of semin-annual customer survey

BANGALORE, INDIA: Riverbed Technology, the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), announced the results of its semi-annual customer survey conducted in March 2008. King Research, an independent marketing research firm serving technology companies for over thirteen years, conducted field research and provided analysis for the semi-annual customer survey. For the latest spring ’08 survey, 828 customers and resellers responded across five continents, representing 506 organizations of every size. According to the results, customer satisfaction with Riverbed products, technical support and professional services exceeds the industry norm. With more than 87 percent of the respondents saying that they would recommend Riverbed products and services, the survey results show that Riverbed and its products deliver as promised. 

The semi-annual survey of Riverbed customers takes an objective look at customer satisfaction with Riverbed products, technical support and professional services. It also looks at the applications Riverbed customers are accelerating with Riverbed Steelhead® products, as well as customer purchase motivations, other vendors considered in the purchase process and why customers chose Riverbed over the competition. 

Of the respondents who evaluated alternatives, 40 customers chose Riverbed Steelhead appliances over Cisco’s WAAS offerings, and 23 percent selected Riverbed Steelhead appliances over Juniper’s WX or WXC appliances. Most interesting is that 31 percent of all survey respondents selected Riverbed without looking at another WDS vendor, showing both the strength of the Riverbed market lead and that the market for WDS is in its early stages.  Riverbed is well-known in the marketplace as the only vendor to provide a best-of-breed, integrated WDS solution that accelerates applications and data for remote offices, data centers and mobile workers across wide area networks (WANs), accelerating access to applications and data up to 100 times faster.

Customer satisfaction: It is all about going faster

Over 87 percent of the respondents gave Riverbed an overall company rating of eight or higher on a scale of 1-10, while a full 39 percent of respondents gave Riverbed a perfect score of 10 out of 10. Product performance, hardware and software quality and management capabilities were all highly rated, with application performance peaking at 8.75 out of 10. The Riverbed technical support team also received exceptional scores, with expertise of support engineers coming in at 8.72 out of 10.

“In the multitude of customer satisfaction studies we have conducted for technology companies over the past thirteen years Riverbed’s customers are among the most enthusiastic.  The overall scores reported are some of the highest that we have seen,” said Diane Hagglund, managing director for King Research. “Overall, Riverbed customers are thrilled with the performance, ease of deployment and management of Steelhead products as well as with the knowledge and responsiveness of the company’s global services organization.”

Purchase motivations: speed and cost savings

King Research surveyed the Riverbed customer base to determine their primary and secondary purchase motivations.

1. 51 percent of respondents selected applications and data acceleration

2. 48 percent of respondents selected Riverbed to dramatically reduce bandwidth costs

3. 33 percent of respondents selected Riverbed to consolidate and virtualize IT infrastructure and improve application performance 

“We had been evaluating Cisco WAAS and were not happy with all the changes we needed to get it to work,” said Riverbed customer and survey respondent Traci Pack, Stryker Instruments, a global leader in medical technology. “Riverbed Steelhead appliances took longer to rack than to get up and running. The Riverbed services team was very responsive and provided everything we needed. I don’t think we could have had a better overall experience and business result.”

Why Riverbed over the competition: More speed, simplicity and scale

The top three reasons that respondents chose Riverbed over the competition were:

* Steelhead products deliver faster and better performance

* Steelhead products are easier to deploy and manage and

* Steelhead products offer broader support for application acceleration 

Based on this, 87 percent of survey respondents said they would purchase Riverbed products again and recommend Riverbed to friends or colleagues.

Other considerations were pre-sales and support, range of features, scalability, product stability and the company’s position as the WDS market leader. Sixty-three percent of customers surveyed said they selected Riverbed over competitors like Cisco WAAS and Juniper WX/WXC due to ease-of- deployment and management. Fifty-four percent of Riverbed customers surveyed also said that the need to accelerate the mobile workforce was an important factor in selecting Riverbed over the competition.