RIVERBED TECHNOLOGY SURPASSES 100 CUSTOMER MARK AFTER ONLY 10 MONTHS

Riverbed Technology, the performance leader in application acceleration on wide area networks, today announced that the company has sold its Steelhead appliances to more than 100 enterprise customers since the company's products were launched only ten months ago. "This company has the fastest market traction I've ever seen. We're growing 50% quarter on quarter in sales to both new customers and repeat sales to our installed base," said Jerry Kennelly, co-founder and CEO of Riverbed. "To think that after only ten months of shipping our product, we have more than one hundred paying customers - global oil companies, financial institutions, government agencies, engineering firms, manufacturers - all kinds of companies, all over the world, it's a testament to the powerful functionality that Riverbed delivers."

One of Riverbed's recent customers is Solutia, a world-class applied chemistry company. Headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, Solutia is a $2.7 billion specialty chemicals, plastics and nylon manufacturer. "Riverbed devices allowed us to successfully centralise our Exchange environment without investing heavily in additional bandwidth" said Eric Nichols, CIO at Solutia. "Now we are using the devices to actually reduce bandwidth (and cost) to and from our sites with no degradation in application performance."

Riverbed is the only application acceleration product on the market that solves all the key problems with application performance on wide area networks (WANs) that are experienced by virtually every multi-site company in the world: The company's Steelhead appliances deliver the industry's best network compression, optimise the behaviour of TCP, and add application-specific optimisation to minimise the effect of high latency on common enterprise applications.

With Steelhead appliances, Riverbed customers experience significant benefits:
Applications run up to 100 times faster. The acceleration of Exchange, Windows, FTP, HTTP, Notes and other key enterprise applications used on WANs dramatically improves collaboration, file sharing, and productivity.
Redundant WAN traffic is eliminated, reducing bandwidth utilisation by 60% to 95% on average. This enables network managers to delay or avoid WAN bandwidth upgrades, or even de-provision their current bandwidth.
IT architects have the freedom to consolidate file servers, email servers, NAS, and tape libraries from remote offices to data centres - without degrading performance. Successful site consolidation can save millions in IT operating expenses.

"The application acceleration marketplace has really been heating up in the last six months" said Joe Skorupa, Principal Analyst at Gartner. "Enterprise customers should consider implementing application acceleration solutions when they want to consolidate remote office infrastructure, accelerate applications or optimise WAN bandwidth. In most cases, customers will want to look for solutions that support a broad range of applications and protocols".