Two questions to easily understand Riverbed's 2018 and 2019

[51CTO.com original article] Recently, Riverbed held a media meeting in Beijing at the end of 2018. At the meeting, Riverbed and many media conducted comprehensive exchanges and interactions on Riverbed's market development, product technology updates, channel policies and other contents.

"We are a supplier that can provide end-to-end performance monitoring system solutions. We can help enterprise users measure the actual effects of their digital experience from the perspective of end users. Whether it is database, server, network, middleware, storage... we can provide end-to-end monitoring from both network and application aspects through one platform." said Yuan Zhiling, general manager of Riverbed Greater China.

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Yuan Zhiling, General Manager of Riverbed Greater China

What did Riverbed do in 2018?

In recent years, Riverbed has been seeking changes, and its overall business has grown very rapidly. Looking back at Riverbed's 2018, Yuan Zhiling, General Manager of Riverbed Greater China, said that Riverbed had done a good business this year and its performance was growing steadily. The digital era contains huge market opportunities. The market size of Riverbed's digital performance solutions exceeds US$30 billion, which has tripled compared to four years ago. In the past few quarters, enterprises have paid more and more attention to digital experience management (DEM), and it is crucial for enterprises to effectively manage and measure digital experience.

In the face of a digital era that is being disrupted, it is particularly important to have a forward-looking mindset. With expectations and goals for the future, in March 2018, Riverbed launched the Digital Performance Platform and a new brand image of "Digital Performance Company" to accelerate the company's strategy and provide industry-leading solutions to maximize digital performance and help customers gain new growth opportunities in a market with a market value of more than US$30 billion. This is mainly an adjustment of Riverbed's brand image and development strategy.

In terms of product updates, in June 2018, Riverbed released a new version of SteelCentral, reshaping the image of APM tools in the digital age; in October 2018, it launched a Microsoft product integration solution to accelerate the implementation of cloud strategy and maximize digital performance; in November 2018, it launched a new version of the SD-WAN solution, significantly enhancing enterprise-level routing functions and providing flexible subscription prices. The Riverbed SD-WAN solution can be deployed as a virtual device or a comprehensive WAN edge solution to integrate SD-WAN, application acceleration, visualization and security functions into a single device. At present, the number of Riverbed SD-WAN customers has exceeded 1,000.

In terms of channel building, in January 2018, Riverbed launched a new channel partner program, Riverbed Rise, which uses performance as a consideration standard and aims to reward various types of partners, business models and users' various technology consumption preferences; in November 2018, Riverbed launched the first "Digital Performance Engineering Certification Program RCPE". The new Riverbed education and training aims to cultivate professional skills in performance engineering and management to support the development of digital business. RCPE includes five professional paths: end-user experience and user visualization, network and infrastructure visualization, wide area network optimization, SD-WAN network configuration, virtualization and storage, as well as four learning levels: RCPE Foundations (basic level), RCPE Associate (engineer level), RCPE Profressional (senior engineer level), and RCPE Expert (expert level).

What does Riverbed want to do in 2019?

2018 is already in the past, and 2019 is in progress! What plans does Riverbed have for the new year?

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Zhang Xiaohe, Technical Director of Riverbed Greater China

Focusing on hot technologies, Zhang Xiaohe, technical director of Riverbed Greater China, said that Riverbed hopes to provide customers with more effective and quantitative visualization solutions through investment in IoT and AI technologies, combined with existing product solutions, to help customers solve end-to-end digital experience and ultimately achieve digital transformation services for enterprises. In addition, Riverbed will also combine the gradual marketization of 5G to bring more diverse and distributed traffic collection points and monitoring, helping enterprises overcome the challenges brought by the implementation of IoT projects.

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Li Yaozong, technical solution architect of Riverbed Asia Pacific

Li Yaozong, technical solution architect of Riverbed Asia Pacific, said that cloud is the main driving force of digital transformation, and cloud is making digital experience management more important. Therefore, in 2019, the Riverbed SteelCentral solution will continue to be updated to enhance the digital experience management capabilities for the cloud. Currently, the latest version of the digital experience management (DEM) solution Riverbed SteelCentral can significantly improve the performance of cloud applications. By introducing new application performance management (APM) and network performance management (NPM) functions, the new version of SteelCentral fundamentally changes the performance management method of cloud architecture, giving native cloud applications and cloud networks higher visualization capabilities.

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Qiang Zhao, Senior Channel Director, Riverbed Greater China

Regarding the channel construction in the new year, Zhao Qiang, senior channel director of Riverbed Greater China, revealed: "In 2019, while ensuring that the basic structure remains unchanged, the Riverbed Rise channel partner program will be slightly adjusted to further encourage partners to generate new projects. Partners' own product projects can receive additional rewards after passing our certification and approval. Through this form of change, we hope to cultivate more partners with independent capabilities to help Riverbed drive business."

On the other hand, Riverbed's engineer certification system was previously implemented in conjunction with traditional channel programs. Like many manufacturers, it has certified engineers, pre-sales and after-sales, etc. However, with the enrichment of Riverbed's products and changes in customer levels, this certification method has become outdated. "We hope to drive partners to not only understand products but also solutions, have the ability to deliver products, and become digital performance experts. Therefore, we launched the 'Digital Performance Engineering Certification Program RCPE'". In order to allow partners and customers to learn anytime and anywhere, Riverbed has digitized all courses. The RCPE certification program platform will be fully launched in 2019. By then, both exams and learning can be completed on this platform.

In an interview with ***, Yuan Zhiling pointed out that in 2018, the emergence and development of SD-WAN led to the shrinkage of the WAN optimization market, while the SD-WAN market is expanding. Therefore, "In 2019, we will continue to focus on SD-WAN, continue to innovate, and release new SD-WAN solutions. For example, we will integrate wireless product capabilities into SD-WAN solutions. Of course, the WAN optimization, application and network performance management visualization market are still our key focus." In addition, he said that in 2019, Riverbed will spend more time and energy, focusing on industries such as government, education, finance and operators.

[51CTO original article, please indicate the original author and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]