Don't call Riverbed just a WAN optimization company anymore. It's become something more.

[51CTO.com original article] Recently, Riverbed launched the Digital Performance Platform and a new brand image of "Digital Performance Company". The Riverbed Digital Performance Platform combines digital experience, cloud network and cloud branch solutions to help enterprises create more possibilities.

Last Tuesday, Yuan Zhiling, general manager of Riverbed Greater China, reiterated at a media communication meeting that the company is starting a new journey and Riverbed is no longer "just a WAN optimization company."

Riverbed is no longer just a WAN optimization company

"Our company was founded 16 years ago, and at that time we only focused on WAN acceleration, which is still our flagship product. However, the world is different now. More and more companies are moving towards digital transformation, and more and more companies are choosing cloud computing. Our products also cover from the end-user end to the cloud. Riverbed is no longer just a WAN acceleration company." said Yuan Zhiling.

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The reporter learned that Riverbed's transformation was not unexpected or sudden. As early as five or six years ago, Riverbed had laid the foundation for today's enterprise transformation, and successively acquired OPNET, a company known for its application performance, Aternity, an innovative end-user experience monitoring company, Xirrus, a Wi-Fi solution provider, and so on. After several years of development, Riverbed has integrated the products of these acquired companies into a common platform. For wide area network problems, visualization problems, wireless problems, etc., Riverbed can provide corresponding solutions to meet the corresponding needs of enterprises.

Today, Riverbed is no longer just a WAN optimization company, but a digital performance company that helps enterprises maximize the digital performance of all aspects of their business and create more possibilities. Riverbed's unified integrated digital performance platform combines digital experience management, cloud network and cloud branch solutions to provide digital enterprises with modern IT architecture and operational agility, significantly accelerating business performance and results transformation.

Three major challenges that cloud computing and digitalization bring to IT

Driven by mainstream technologies such as cloud computing, mobile Internet, and analytical tools, digitalization has become increasingly important and is becoming a key task for enterprises. The digital transformation of enterprises is an inevitable trend. According to the IDC report, 67% of the world's top 1,000 companies and 50% of China's top 1,000 companies have made digital transformation their primary corporate strategy. In addition, according to IDC data, by 2021, at least 50% of the world's GDP will be digitized, and growth will also be driven by digital products, operations, and interpersonal relationships.

However, cloud computing and digitalization have brought three major challenges to IT:

First, there is a lack of agility. Agility is the ability of an enterprise to respond to change and is critical to the success of an enterprise. When faced with competitive threats, highly agile enterprises can quickly respond to challenges with innovative business models. However, enterprises that implement digitalization and cloudification based on traditional network architecture lack sufficient flexibility and are unable to freely develop external and internal service capabilities in the way that best suits them.

Second, fragmented visualization. In the digital age, data is distributed everywhere, including in the cloud, mobile terminals, data centers, branches, etc. This leads to problems with IT platform performance management. Data may have performance problems or even downtime in different places. If visualization cannot be achieved and problems cannot be solved in a timely manner, the end-user experience will be reduced.

Third, risks are increasing. With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of endpoints and data that IT departments must monitor will continue to increase significantly. At the same time, the increasing reliance on cloud services means that enterprises have given up some control over company assets. However, IT is still in a dilemma in ensuring the normal operation of applications and protecting users and data. Traditional security methods are costly and often inefficient, and they also face risks brought by the pressure of rapid innovation when dealing with aging infrastructure and massive amounts of data.

In fact, many companies are still using traditional IT infrastructure to handle current and future digital initiatives. IDC said that due to the lack of a strategic architecture, 60% of digital transformation initiatives will not scale. If today's companies want to compete in the digital age, they must effectively utilize modern IT architecture and next-generation networks.

Integrated digital performance platform helps enterprises achieve digital transformation

To help enterprises meet challenges, in this increasingly digital era, Riverbed effectively uses its own brand and traditional performance technology to meet the needs of enterprises for "digital performance". With the new positioning, Riverbed has launched a complete and unified integrated digital performance platform to help users change the way they run applications and services. These applications will closely connect people, businesses and experiences in the digital environment.

Covering every corner of a customer's IT environment, the platform consists of three powerful product families that help accelerate digital business outcomes:

◆Cloud Network: It can help users simplify the design, deployment and management of cloud-connected networks, while providing users with instant, secure and optimized application connections and access to the network from any location.

◆Digital experience: In an era where user experience is the priority, we integrate device-based user experience, infrastructure, application and network monitoring to provide a complete view for user digital experience management.

◆Cloud branch: Centralized management of infrastructure to ensure absolute data security. Data is the lifeblood of all digital businesses and the foundation for providing branch users with an excellent local experience.

On the security aspect of the digital performance platform, Li Yaozong, technical solution architect of Riverbed Asia Pacific, said: "After enterprises deploy Riverbed solutions, they can centrally control access rights, accounts and passwords; when performing WAN acceleration and optimization, the information transmitted in the middle can be encrypted, including performance data. From any data generated by operation and maintenance itself to the data generated in security, we consider the issue of security to properly protect these digital assets."

Take Jun He Law Firm as an example. In 2012, when Jun He Law Firm just deployed a document management system in Shanghai, it used a data-centric management model and adopted SteelHead, a component of the Riverbed digital performance platform, to accelerate data and applications. There are various applications in Jun He's business environment. How to ensure that these applications can operate safely and efficiently is one of the company's IT strategic goals. Among them, the end-user experience is very important, and poor user experience may lead to the failure of the entire project. Therefore, after comparing multiple products, Jun He chose the Riverbed solution, which has a very obvious effect and saves 70%-90% of bandwidth usage. In the future, Jun He hopes to expand Riverbed's leading digital performance solution to more branches and optimize the performance of more applications.

Seize the opportunities presented by cloud and digital transformation

Speaking of Riverbed's business development strategy in China in 2018, Yuan Zhiling said: "The key is to seize the opportunities brought by cloud and digital transformation." Riverbed's growth strategy focuses on three aspects:

***, continuous innovation for the entire solution portfolio. This year, SD-WAN products will be officially released in China; Riverbed now has more than 300 patents in the fields of applications, digital performance and cloud networks, and has been rated as "***" by Gartner Magic Quadrant more than ten times.

Second, platform sales maintained a good momentum, with a focus on digital experience management/visualization, cloud networking (accelerating SaaS and cloud application performance); key industries include finance, energy, manufacturing, retail and law.

Third, channel investment: Continue to invest by launching the Riverbed Rise channel program; further expand strategic partnerships with Huawei and other partners.

It is reported that in the past few quarters, more than 40% of Riverbed's global product portfolio/platform sales came from multi-product bookings, with strong demand; it is also experiencing strong growth in some new solutions, such as SD-WAN, SteelConnect and SteelCentral Aternity, especially SD-WAN customers, which already have more than 500 customers worldwide. Currently, Riverbed has more than 30,000 customers and annual revenue of more than US$1 billion. In the past few years, Riverbed's overall target market size has increased by 3 times, with a market potential of up to US$30 billion.

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