Riverbed Technology, the performance leader in application acceleration on wide area networks, today announced the launch of its Riverbed Partner Network. The Riverbed Partner Network is a key component of Riverbed's global go-to-market strategy as the company scales its sales organisation to accommodate the exponential growth in demand for its wide-area data services (WDS) solutions. Riverbed recently announced its 200th customer in just over a year of shipping product. In Q2, 2005, the company doubled its customer base.
The Riverbed Partner Network is made up of the best networking and storage-oriented solution providers in the industry who Riverbed supports with tools, technical assistance, and people to facilitate business growth and overall success in selling Riverbed's patented and groundbreaking WDS solutions.
"Every 10 years or so, a new product appears that revolutionises how people work," said Hayes Drumright, president, Trace3. "Riverbed's Steelhead is one of those technologies. It is one of the most incredible product lines that we've ever represented. Steelhead allows users on the WAN to experience LAN-like performance and it's a massive cost saver. In addition, it's simple to use and install. When we first heard the claims, we were incredulous. But then we saw the box in action and realised that it actually worked. The response from customers is often the same. When they see the box in action, the decision to buy is an easy one. We're batting a thousand with Riverbed -- we've come out ahead in every deal proposed with them."
The Riverbed Partner Network program offers two levels of partnership: Certified and Premier. All partners who join the network start at the Certified level. As partners grow with Riverbed and achieve certain milestones, they can achieve Premier status, with additional support and compensation benefits.
Riverbed's Steelhead(TM) appliance is the only WDS product on the market that solves all the key problems with application performance on wide area networks (WANs). These problems have been or are currently 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 optimisations to minimise the effect of high latency on common enterprise applications.
"Customer demand for our field-tested and proven WDS solutions has created a tremendous opportunity for savvy channel partners," said Bertrand Yansouni, vice president of channel sales at Riverbed Technology. "In addition to delivering award-winning functionality to customers, Steelhead is a great product for the channel. Any organisation with a remote office is a candidate, the product has a short sales cycle, and there is a high degree of repeat business. To capitalise on this opportunity, we are aggressively building out the Riverbed Partner Network. Riverbed's Steelhead appliance offers real value to customers, as it solves the latency and bandwidth issues experienced by distributed enterprises. We are looking for a select group of partners who can help these organisations solve their remote office problems and truly take advantage of a distributed workforce."
With Steelhead appliances, Riverbed customers experience significant benefits:
Applications run up to 100 times faster. The acceleration of Exchange, Windows, FTP, HTTP, Notes, MS SQL 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.
Organisations can now locate file backups hundreds, or even thousands of miles from the data centre without experiencing significant delays when replicating or backing up data across the WAN. This allows throughputs ranging between 500-700 Mbps, even on inter-continental links where round-trip latencies are well over several hundred milliseconds.
"We've evaluated several of the WDS solution providers and found that Riverbed offers the most comprehensive solution available today," said Craig Sieve, partner at Foedus, a New Hampshire based solutions provider. "Our business is focused on improving infrastructure for our clients' core business applications. At the same time, nearly all of our clients are looking to reduce costs and IT maintenance overhead. Until now, solving these competing issues has been nearly impossible. Now with Riverbed, we are able to simplify infrastructure at remote sites, while ensuring that end-users don't experience slowdowns over the wide area network (WAN). Riverbed is the only solution we've seen that delivers the broad functionality that meets the demands of our diverse customer base."
WDS offers high-value opportunities for resellers
Riverbed's Jon Arnold, Regional Director, Northern Europe, participates in a short Q&A session to throw more light on the company's channel strategy.
Q: What is your route to market?
A: Riverbed is a strongly channel focussed vendor. 100 per cent of UK sales go through either direct resellers or our distribution partner Zycko.
Riverbed has a sales team in the UK that is responsible for initiating and building sales relationships with major users. The sales cycle then runs in conjunction with our channel partners who ultimately supply and support the Riverbed solution.
Q: How do you view the current state of the European market for storage technologies?
A: The market for wide-area data services (WDS) solutions such as Riverbeds Steelhead appliance is growingly rapidly as we enable the consolidation of data centres and storage. This is a new solution set, so it offers substantial high-value opportunities for resellers wanting to enter this area.
Q: Do you need to expand your current channels? If so, what kinds of partners are you looking for?
A: The market for Riverbeds solution is huge and in order to properly address this customer base Riverbed is actively looking for resellers who are comfortable selling new and compelling technology solutions to organisations ranging from small enterprises to the large corporations.
Q: How will you support them?
A: Riverbed is developing a channel strategy that will actively recruit and support the best-of-breed resellers to enable them to sell strategic solutions profitably. A full range of tools and resources is available to support this strategy.
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