Application performance vendor Riverbed wants to help its partners, including MSPs, deliver location-independent services. The key to this initiative is the Riverbed Application Performance Platform (APP), which it hopes partners will use to power new services.
APP is a family of integrated tools that let shops host applications wherever it makes most sense, and still deliver the software with the performance that IT and end users demand.
“With organizations shifting to buying managed services from both traditional service providers and cloud service providers, Riverbed is expanding its go-to-market capability in this area as a key initiative in 2014,” said Dave Peranich, president of global field operations at Riverbed.
“The ultimate goal is to make it easy for every organization to turn distance and location into a competitive advantage by working with our partners to offer all the necessary capabilities as easy, fast, managed turnkey services.”
The new program lets partners offer management, monitoring, and of course network and application performance.
One MSP is already well on board.
“We are pleased to see Riverbed make an investment in the area of service delivery,” said Karl Heinzelmann, senior vice president, Global Solutions for Orange Business Services in the Americas. “Our customers are looking for us - as an IT integrator -- to provide complete solutions, including managed services. By building solutions specifically with service delivery in mind, Riverbed is in sync with our own service strategy. It will support the acceleration of our time-to-market with profitable services and provide great added-value to our customers.”
Gartner sees value in the Riverbed approach. “The key to advancing during this unprecedented time in technology markets is to take a customer centered sales approach (beyond product and market) -- to adapt sales models that support customers' new buying processes,” the research house said.
Executive Backup
To help the new program succeed, Riverbed promoted Randy Schirman to senior vice president, service delivery. Schirman was picked in 2012 and 2013 as a Computer Reseller News (CRN) Channel Chief.
Riverbed, now 12 years old, first shipped its Steelhead WAN Optimization appliance back in 2004.
“We started Riverbed 11 years ago to eliminate distance and location as variables in delivering applications by solving the problems of latency and bandwidth limitations in wide area networks. We’re proud of our heritage in pioneering the WAN Optimization market and we believe that Steelhead has an important and bright future. But Riverbed today is much more than Wan Optimization,” said Jerry M. Kennelly, Chairman and CEO, Co-founder of Riverbed. “Over the last four years, we’ve made the journey from a single product to four major product sets that add up to something much bigger, the industry’s most complete application performance platform to enable a concept we call: Location-Independent Computing.”
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
