Exclusive: Riverbed unveils revamped brand, new division

In addition to building a new brand that reflects the company’s evolution and technology, how is Riverbed supporting its customers? Can you name some of your latest innovations?
By building on our 20-year history of innovation and the invaluable experience gained by serving thousands of enterprises and public sector customers globally, including 95 per cent of Fortune 100, and 77 per cent of Forbes Global 500, we have been able to identify the primary pain point of the modern digital enterprise – how to provide exceptional digital experiences in an increasingly complex, distributed and hybrid world.

We recognise that these digital experiences hinge on IT teams having actionable insight which is made possible by observability. Organisations want to optimise performance, maximise productivity, reduce risk, eliminate waste and improve customer experience. Technology organisations, especially IT, become invaluable when they can gather information that can be easily understood and used to make faster, better, more accurate decisions – fuelling innovation, which drives the business and organisational performance.

Observability is meant to solve these problems, but current solutions fall short. With Alluvio by Riverbed – we are developing a disruptive and differentiated approach to unified observability that unifies data, insights, and actions across all domains and environments. Alluvio enables IT to cut through massive complexity and data noise to provide seamless digital experiences that drive enterprise performance for both the employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX).

The Alluvio portfolio will be complimented by our acceleration portfolio which provides fast, agile, secure acceleration of any app over any network to users, anywhere. Together, the powerful combination empower our customers to provide a seamless digital experience for their customers and employees, and thus drive end-to-end performance for their business.

Can you explain in brief about this new division ‘Alluvio’? What does the term stand for?
Riverbed has invested and focused the company’s R&D efforts in the last year to develop technology and a unique approach to unified observability that is comprehensive, unified and easy-to-operate. Alluvio derives from alluvium – the place where riverbeds unite and create the most nutrient-rich environment to mine for gold – with the ‘o’ standing for observability. Metaphorically, it represents the coming together of discrete telemetry streams where insights that are hard to find, but worth their weight in gold, reside. Alluvio unified observability solutions help customers find that gold as fast as possible, turning actionable insights into business success so companies can stay competitive, productive and satisfy users’ fierce appetite for seamless digital experiences.

?We’re announcing a transformative strategy—and we’re excited to announce Alluvio by Riverbed.

Learn why we're disrupting the #UnifiedObservability market: https://t.co/yt1xrPm0DO #EmpowertheExperience #IlluminatetheExperience #AlluvioByRiverbed pic.twitter.com/OQ9ipRl0Sv

— Riverbed (@riverbed) April 27, 2022

Why is Riverbed setting its sights on the observability market and transitioning to unified observability and modern acceleration solutions? Please share details about your recently launched unified observability strategy.
Leading industry and financial analysts have estimated that observability will be a $19bn market in just two years. While enterprises are in urgent need of solutions that will assist their strategic decision making, most of today’s observability tools only provide massive volumes of alerts with little context or actionable insights. Rather than being of value, this deluge of unactionable data fails to provide organisations with a complete picture of their IT environments.

Our Alluvio portfolio has been designed to provide IT with unified view to see through massive complexity and transform data into actionable insights across the entire digital ecosystem. This portfolio includes the leading visibility tools available today that are used by thousands of organisations globally.

We are set to begin the Beta for a SaaS-based Alluvio unified observability solution this May, with the aim of announcing general availability later this year. We presently have several customers, including some Fortune 500 companies, trailing this solution. Their feedback has highlighted that our approach to unified observability helps eliminate data silos and alert fatigue; improve decision-making; apply expert knowledge broadly and continuously improve digital service quality, all with a simple user interface.

What are the current observability trends that you see?
While observability is a clear requirement for customers, the solutions being offered by the majority of technology vendors aren’t aligned with what these businesses actually need. We’re therefore seeing the market evolve as demand grows for observability that is no longer just for DevOps teams, SREs (site reliability engineering), cloud-native environments, and APM (application performance monitoring) use cases. Riverbed believes a far greater segment of stakeholders can benefit from observability – from network teams that can use it for fault management, to line of business teams that leverage these solutions to optimise their applications.

As a CEO, how do you plan to take the company to the next level and drive profitable growth in business?
We successfully onboarded over 200 new enterprise customers last year. We are a “customer first” company. The customer is at the heart of everything we do. We’ve seen strong market demand for our technology, including three straight quarters of 30 per cent growth for our unified observability and visibility solutions. We are focused on executing and elevating the growth of Alluvio and extending the acceleration business while driving continuous improvements in operational excellence; ensuring Riverbed is best positioned to capitalise on new market opportunities and deliver innovation for our partners and customers that enable them to deliver on the digital promise.