First, San Francisco-based Riverbed released its Central Management Console (CMC) 5.0, a management tool that helps deploy, configure and manage Riverbed Steelhead appliances while also offering visibility into the performance of applications running on the WAN. Riverbed director of product marketing Apurva Dave said the CMC updates supply network administrators and VARs the ability to structure Steelhead boxes, new policy-based configurations, role-based administration and centralized security management.

Through a Web-based interface, users can configure, update and monitor Steelheads and also define reports that meet management requirements, get visibility into performance by port, application, appliance or group; simplify configuration by defining groups of similar appliances; modify policies; and allow users to have read only or read-write access to certain operations and appliances.

VARs said the ability to see into traffic as it passes on the WAN has become a necessity for customers.

"Visibility into the accelerated traffic on the network is increasingly important for our clients," said Hayes Drumwright, CEO of Trace3, an Irvine, Calif.-based solution provider. "The high level of detail they'll derive from these upgrades are ideal for determining which applications are being accelerated at the optimal levels."

Along with updating CMC, Riverbed also announced a new stable of technology partners it is teaming with to add new visibility into Steelheads. Dave said Riverbed is expanding its partner ecosystem and alliances with select visibility partners within the Riverbed Technology Alliance (RTA). He said together Riverbed and its partners, which include AlterPoint, OPNET, Compuware, Mazu Networks, NetDialog, NetScout and Solarwinds, supply enterprises and VARs complementary and compatibility-tested solutions to develop a strong network management strategy.

Visibility partners, Dave said, will help users leverage Steelhead and add in tools to analyze, manage and optimize their WAN infrastructure. He said users can analyze their infrastructure to gain visibility into their communications infrastructure and applications. Additionally, they can manage their resources for efficient and consistent operation of their infrastructure and application environment.

Dave said VARs can offer solutions from Riverbed's visibility partners as complimentary solutions to address pre-deployment application performance simulation and planning, post-deployment applications monitoring and visibility, performance trouble-shooting, policy and device configuration management and service provider oriented SLA reporting.

"The channel can add more services to predict what the network will look like after a Steelhead deployment," Dave said. "And partners can bundle the solution for overall network visibility to help customers find where they have problems, whether they can consolidate and how consolidation could impact application response times."

Using tools from partners, VARs can enable customers to plan for network and service resources and the components need to optimize application performance before wide-area data services tools are deployed; gain visibility into key application performance expectations and end user performance; identify and isolate application performance problems; offer post-WDS deployment analysis to measure and report on performance gains; gain new management capabilities to ensure compliance with guidelines and policies; and audit the network to determine SLA adherence.

"It's a great way to slide and dive global information," Dave said. "People want to know not only what's going on a certain link, but an overall view."

Today, Riverbed Technology announced that it is acquiring privately-held Aternity. Aternity provides end-user experience (EUE) solutions as part of a broader application performance monitoring (APM) offering. The deal is expected to close in August 2016, and the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition will extend the reach of Riverbed’s SteelCentral performance monitoring solutions into end-user devices, rounding out an end-to-end solution that is critical for enterprise digital efforts.

“Aternity has a highly complementary value proposition with respect to the SteelCentral portfolio,” said Nik Koutsoukos, Vice President, Product Marketing at Riverbed Technology. “With Aternity, SteelCentral offers end-to-end performance monitoring, including the network infrastructure.”

The Aternity solution leverages agents on end-user devices that monitor millions of mobile, virtual, and desktop endpoints across 160 enterprise customers. This technology analyzes end-user perception of availability, latency, execution, and overall quality. As a result, Aternity provides an understanding of enterprise end-users and their interactions in the context of business processes.

Riverbed SteelCentral already offers visibility into network traffic via telemetry from unified communications platforms, wide-area networks (WANs), and network devices. The solution also monitors application performance via application server telemetry and application code, as well as performance data from browsers.

Aternity will add end-user device telemetry to this mix, providing critical user data for situations where browser data is insufficient, for example, when users are interacting with mobile apps.

The Aternity technology will also enhance use cases that leverage combinations of Riverbed solutions, including its SteelConnect software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) networking solution and its SteelHead WAN optimization technology.

In particular, these combinations of technologies will monitor public cloud applications, software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, as well as enterprise applications, affording enterprise customers with end-to-end visibility across modern application portfolios.

“Enterprises are accelerating their adoption of Hybrid IT environments to Improve agility and control infrastructure costs,” said Mike Sargent, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Riverbed SteelCentral Business Unit. “By capturing and analyzing how applications and devices perform from the end user’s perspective, Aternity offers enterprises the ability to proactively manage these increasingly complex IT environments to drive greater workforce productivity.”

In addition to Riverbed’s enterprise customer base, the Aternity acquisition will also expand its offering to managed service providers (MSPs) who serve midmarket as well as enterprise customers. Today’s MSPs generally offer managed cloud-based capabilities to their clients, and with the addition of Aternity, Riverbed will enable MSPs to gain end-to-end visibility into such cloud environments.

For a company with its roots in network management, the Aternity acquisition gives Riverbed a solid digital performance management story, alongside competitors like AppDynamics, Dynatrace, New Relic, and SOASTA. While each of these vendors has its own strengths, Riverbed brings to the table deep experience with networking, providing an important differentiator as software-defined networking becomes standard across the enterprise. Now with the addition of Aternity’s EUE capabilities, Riverbed becomes a serious digital player.

Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, Riverbed Technology, and SOASTA are Intellyx customers. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers.

‘We’re solving a lot of problems that people were having to cobble together multiple vendors and point products to solve. … No one else has been able to look at network, application or end user and pull that data in together,’ Riverbed CEO Dan Smoot tells CRN about the company’s new Alluvio by Riverbed brand.

Riverbed is making good on its promise to disrupt the market and reclaim its position as a tech leader in the observability arena, Riverbed CEO Dan Smoot (pictured) told CRN.

The San Francisco-based company Wednesday revealed its two core brands: Riverbed Acceleration and a new brand identity, Alluvio by Riverbed, which reflects the company’s heavy focus and investment in unified observability over the past year.

“The next piece of our journey is actually bringing the unified observability portfolio under this new brand called Alluvio, which really is a disruptive structure where we take all of the capabilities that we’re doing in network application and end user and aggregating that data into a new, contextualized, correlated platform, where you can take those assets and actually do something that the market has not yet seen,” Smoot said.

[Related: Riverbed CEO Focused On ‘Disruption’ In Network Observability Space In 2022]

Riverbed in February told CRN it was cleaning up its branding to make its products and offerings clearer to partners and end customers. The company’s two focused, but separate product areas were its WAN optimization and acceleration and network performance monitoring (NPM) products, and its Aternity products for End-User Experience Management (EUEM) and observability that it gained in 2016 via acquisition.

The Alluvio by Riverbed portfolio includes Riverbed’s NPM products, IT Infrastructure Monitoring (ITIM) and Digital Experience Management (DEM), application performance management (APM) and Aternity EUEM software offerings that are available today and in use by thousands of enterprises, the company said.

“We really will have that end-to-end visibility piece. It’s that whole idea of unified observability—digital endpoint, all the way down to the server side, which is, I think, really one of the things that stands out for us at Riverbed, just being able to provide that level of visibility across the flows of the data,” said Riverbed Senior Vice President of Global Partners and Alliances Alex Thurber, who joined the company in February.

Smoot promised disruption and specific branding around its unified observability business this year. The Alluvio brand is helping the company refresh its strategy and present the increasingly compelling opportunity around observability to its channel partners.

Riverbed has seen more than 30 percent year-over-year bookings growth in its visibility and observability solutions in the last three quarters, including its most recent fiscal quarter. Hybrid work and networks, multi-cloud environments, and modern application architectures are driving this growth, the company said.

Unfortunately, the same trends are making it harder for IT teams to pull insight from their data and proactively manage performance using their existing tools, Smoot said.

Many observability tools in the market today limit or sample data for IT teams, leaving out some user, network and application data that IT could use for troubleshooting problems within increasingly distributed infrastructures. Alluvio, Riverbed’s unified observability software arm, will supply IT teams and solution providers a unified view and data that can be used to make decisions or inject automation into hybrid environments, the company said.

“We’re solving a lot of problems that people were having to cobble together multiple vendors and point products to solve. They are seeing us as a single source for a very complex problem, which is how an infrastructure is really performing from cloud, to hybrid, to end user and customer experience,” Smoot said. “No one else has been able to look at network, application or end user and pull that data in together. That’s what makes this so unique.”

Partners can use the Alluvio portfolio to not only help customers identify issues, but also fix problems, Thurber said. “That’s the exciting part for partners,” he added.

Riverbed does about 90 percent of its business through the channel.

The name “Alluvio” comes from the word alluvium, the place where riverbeds unite and form a space that can be mined for gold or, in Riverbed’s case, data. The “o” in Alluvio stands for observability, the company said.

The IEEE Public Visibility initiative is a communications program that seeks to increase the visibility of IEEE and to serve as a global voice for the engineering profession.  

The mission of the IEEE Public Visibility Committee is to increase awareness, understanding, and appreciation of how engineering, computing, and technology benefit humanity, and to promote the visibility of engineering, computing, and IEEE technical professionals who carry out this work.

The key ingredient of the IEEE Public Visibility program is the technical expertise of IEEE members and volunteers who serve as media champions and global thought leaders on prominent technology advancements and issues. Their valuable commentary in the media helps raise the overall visibility of IEEE. 

An important component of the Public Visibility program is Partnership Marketing, which looks to collaborate with IEEE Societies and operating units to provide added exposure to their content through social media campaigns and the IEEE Transmitter content portal.

The benefits of working with Public Visibility:

• Extends IEEE’s reach
• Establishes social media value, reaching a broader audience—over 3 million people
• Can provide increased awareness and visibility at major industry events

Visit this webpage frequently, as it will serve as a central repository for background information, presentations, and project milestones.

See latest updates (IEEE Account is required)

View presentation and report archive (IEEE Account is required)