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According to the report, “The WOC (WAN optimization controller) market is maturing rapidly, but remains dynamic, with a high level of innovation from vendors.” 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 need to have a broad features 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 Future Is Now: Cloud Computing, Branch Office Consolidation and Virtualization
Over the past year Riverbed has focused its efforts on meeting the ever-changing needs of global organizations, which has led to the development of a comprehensive solution that provides LAN-like performance no matter where an employee or data is located. The breadth of the Riverbed product family has expanded to provide organizations with enterprise-wide network and application visibility, unmatched performance for large-scale data center-to-data center replication, “local” performance for remote and mobile workers, and acceleration for private and public cloud environments. In 2010, Riverbed introduced three new products to address the growing demands of the global enterprise:

* Virtual Steelhead™ enables customers to deploy Riverbed WAN optimization solutions in a broader range of environments that may have specialized requirements, such as ruggedized environments or environments with space limitations, as well as data centers that have been heavily virtualized.

* Riverbed Cloud Steelhead™ instances accelerate the process of migrating data and applications to the public cloud, and accelerate access to that data and those applications from anywhere.

* The Riverbed Whitewater™ appliance provides organizations with a fast, secure and cost-efficient method to seamlessly integrate cloud storage into their existing backup infrastructure and disaster recovery (DR) strategies.

With these new solutions, Riverbed helps deliver flexible, accelerated performance without requiring IT organizations to make changes to their current architecture.

To address the needs of organizations looking to embrace globalization and empower employees in remote offices, IT departments have traditionally deployed rich resources at the enterprise edge, which has proven to add complexity to an organization’s IT infrastructure. The Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) provides enterprises with a Branch Office Box (BOB) solution that addresses the enterprises’ desire to provide branch offices with essential edge IT services, while eliminating the amount of distributed servers. The RSP allows enterprises to run up to five additional services or applications virtually in a protected partition on the Steelhead® appliance. In addition to providing support for local print services, DNS/DHCP and enterprise video, Riverbed expanded its partner ecosystem in 2010 to also provide McAfee Firewall Enterprise and Web Gateway products, Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway, Polycom Video Edge, and Vyatta Subscription Edition router software as edge service packages on the RSP.

Expanding Reach: Strong Partner Ecosystem

With the ability to foster a strong, collaborative sales engagement environment between the company and its partners, the Riverbed Partner Network (RPN) delivers a coverage model that optimizes a customer’s ability to acquire and implement Riverbed solutions in a manner that best fits their needs — through either value added resellers, systems integrators or service providers, in either capital expense or operating expense financial models.