Interviews

Riverbed Bullish On Opportunities Ahead

Interviewed by Radhika Nallayam Thu, Feb 11, 2010

We don’t consider Blue Coat as a strong competitor in the area where we operate. For us, it is primarily a web-security company.
Van Diamandakis Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Riverbed Technology

How has the last year been for Riverbed?

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DIAMANDAKIS: We have been witnessing a double-digit growth for many quarters now. We saw a very healthy growth even during the tough economy and we believe that was a great accomplishment. And interestingly, people have changed their mind about WAN Optimization. This is now considered as a ‘must have’ technology not only by the large enterprises, but also by SMBs across the globe. We have been leveraging on our strategic partnerships and reseller ecosystem to grab new opportunities in the market.

Interestingly, market equations have been changing. Blue Coat is becoming a competitor for you. Earlier, you had said that this market is a ‘three horse race’ among Riverbed, Cisco and Juniper. Do you think you misjudged Blue Coat?

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DIAMANDAKIS: We don’t consider Blue Coat as a strong competitor in the area where we operate. We don’t see them in too many deals and the deals in which we do see them in, our win rate is 90 percent. WAN Optimization is a broad category and it means many things. There have been consolidations and there are many technologies that are now going into this big umbrella of WAN Optimization. According to Gartner, we are the leaders in this market with highest market share in 2008 in advanced WAC (WAN Optimization Controller).

However, since it’s a hot market, many of our competitors are trying to position themselves in different ways. For us, Blue Coat is primarily a web-security company and they drive 90 percent of their revenue through that business. We, however, compete with Cisco as they are all over the place. But our win time against Cisco is again 9 out of 10. We also see competition from Juniper but not as strong as that from Cisco. Our challenge currently is to increase market awareness about Riverbed and WAN optimization as a whole.

You’re into mobile WAN optimization, but there is perception that this technology is very expensive and complex. Operational costs are high. How do you convince the customers?

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DIAMANDAKIS: It’s really not that expensive. Our customers do see value in investing on Steelhead Mobile as it has been built from the existing Steelhead appliance code-base, unlike many of our competitors’ products. Moreover, customers look at software expenditure in terms of RoI and we offer one of the best RoI in the industry.

It’s been more than a year since Riverbed entered the de-duplication market. We have not heard much from you since then.

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DIAMANDAKIS: Extending our knowledge on WAN and storage is something we are looking in to. We will be coming up with new products this year. We were in fact planning to bring it out in 2009. However we are currently working with our customers before coming up with a rock-solid product. Our initial plans are to sell this product to our existing customer base which is over 6000. Storage is definitely going to be another pillar of our vision.

Next :McAfee Talks About Their Plans On UTM

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