The VAR Guy

Riverbed Technology recently up the ante in the application acceleration space with its purchase of load-balancing company Zeus Technology and web content optimization company Aptimize. Riverbed’s plan is to meet the upcoming demands of Internet media head-on without slowing down. The VAR Guy spoke with Paul O’Farrell, vice president of corporate development and strategy, about Riverbed’s future with the two new product lines under its wing. Here’s the scoop …

First, let’s take a look at the newest members of the Riverbed family. Zeus Technology is known for its load-balancing and web traffic management technology, with a focus on cloud and virtual environments. Zeus’ claim to fame is its unique software application delivery controllers (ADCs) that run on a variety of hypervisors to ensure scalability and a higher level of optimization since they live inside application stacks and can migrate through different virtualization environments.

Technology from Aptimize, meanwhile, can take both internal and external web apps and optimize the web page on the fly through a simple data center web server installation. Aptimize claims performance boosts up to 400 percent are possible, all through what’s called “transforming.” Just from the Aptimize software alone, javascript, CSS and other web content is “reorder[ed], merge[d] and resiz[ed],” based on the user and the location of the user. Nifty wizardry, as far as The VAR Guy is concerned, especially since there’s no hardware involved. According to Aptimize, its software plays nice with existing WANs and ADCs to create a super-optimized environment. Another bonus for being software-based? According to Riverbed, it compliments existing Steelhead appliances. Sounds like a real “value-add” to our resident blogger.

Naturally, The VAR Guy wanted to know how Riverbed plans to integrate this technology and make it available to channel partners, and O’Farrell was happy to oblige. ”As the market shifts more toward SaaS applications, we need to extend [our] capabilities,” he said. “Data centers are becoming more virtualized, [so] that led us to the acquisition of Zeus. [And] since most of the applications these days are web-based, we saw the need to go beyond the HTTP optimization, [too].” Hence, the Aptimize acquisition.

O’Farrell noted the products will be available through the reseller channel, “[But currently] we’re channel-mapping, ensuring the appropriate programs [will be] in place.” A more layered approach for partners is in the works, which O’Farrell said is a natural evolution for its partners.

“As an overall observation, typically the resellers who sell Steelhead sell ADC products, too. We don’t see any reason why the product can’t be picked up by our reseller base [now],” he said.

Riverbed’s ongoing goal is to provide optimized solutions for “large and high-growth businesses” that need WAN and optimization “for all traffic kinds, for different kinds of networks,” O’Farrell said. Both Zeus Technologies and Aptimize carry with them a large clutch of customers, so it’s likely Riverbed will be carrying a huge amount of momentum into the marketplace. The VAR Guy will keep close tabs on Riverbed and where Zeus’ and Aptmize’s technology ends up. Two guesses? Either bundled alongside Riverbed’s own appliances, or slowly but surely assimilated into the hardware-based technology Riverbed is already providing.

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