Riverbed Technology and Akamai have announced a strategic partnership and joint product vision to create acceleration solutions for hybrid cloud networks. Such a combination of acceleration technologies could be a game-changer for the cloud space and for cloud providers. Here’s why.

But first, the details: Riverbed and Akamai announced at Interop 2011 the two companies will use their respective expertise in WAN acceleration and Internet acceleration to create solutions that will reduce application performance bottlenecks in cloud networks. Starting in 2012, Akamai technology will be present in Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances, while Riverbed’s WAN acceleration technology will be incorporated into Akamai’s edge servers that run public cloud networks.

To be sure, Riverbed and Akamai are both big players in the acceleration game. But while they’ve both been working in tandem to bring speed and agility to their respective spaces, their business models run parallel – and we all know parallel lines don’t intersect.

But with the proliferation of cloud services and more companies adopting a hybrid network model – half in the cloud, half in the data center – Riverbed’s and Akamai’s technologies are now being seen as downright complementary.

“Traditional interactions are simple if organizations are running all their own applications. Using the cloud, though, introduces a new leg in the network traversing the Internet,” said Miles Kelly, senior director of product marketing at Riverbed. “So we asked the question, How can our two companies accelerate organization’s infrastructure end to end, including cloud-based applications?”

Such a partnership could remove the performance stumbling block many companies currently face when using the cloud – The VAR Guy knows it’s great to know your data is secure when your hard drive fails, but accessing data in the cloud sometimes can be comparable to running a 286 processor.

If Akamai and Riverbed solve the application performance issues currently plaguing cloud use, The VAR Guy believes cloud adoption will increase multifold. Of course, we’ll have to wait at least a year before we know whether the companies’ technology provides the extra boost to make those apps in the cloud hum faster.

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