San Francisco, CA — April 4, 2006 — Riverbed Technology, the performance leader in wide-area data services (WDS), announced today the results of a recent customer survey in which over 300 respondents from more than 200 companies revealed their business and technical motivations for implementing WDS solutions and their reasons for choosing Riverbed's Steelhead® appliances over competitive offerings. The results of the survey show that by far and away the main two technical drivers for selecting a WDS solution were application acceleration improvement and ease of deployment and management. The range of applications that were important to their businesses included File-based applications (CAD CAM), Mail-based applications (Exchange, Notes), Web-based applications, FTP, backup and replication, document management, custom and database driven applications, among other applications. The top three business motivators were in rank order: workforce productivity and collaboration over the wide area network (WAN), site consolidation, and network cost reduction or avoiding a WAN upgrade.

"With more than 700 customers and thousands of boxes deployed worldwide, our Steelhead appliances are proven in the field," said Jerry Kennelly, CEO and president of Riverbed®. "As the survey results clearly show, customers chose Riverbed over the competition because it delivers the best application performance improvement for the broad range of applications that are important to their business, in a product that is easy to deploy and manage."

In addition to questions about purchasing motivations and applications accelerated, respondents were asked how much faster their key applications performed after installing the Steelhead appliances. More than half of the respondents reported greater than a 10x improvement in overall performance, with many reporting improvements greater than 50x and some reporting up to 100x. The performance improvements have allowed these customers to consolidate IT and improve backup and disaster recovery efforts. It has also enabled many customers to improve inter-office collaboration and enabled them to speed business processes.

Lastly, respondents were asked if they considered an alternative before selecting Riverbed. More than half of the respondents reported that they looked at competitive offerings and chose Riverbed's Steelhead appliances over the competition, including Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks. Riverbed's simplicity and ease of management and installation, combined with its overall application acceleration performance capabilities, were among the reasons that customers chose Riverbed over the alternatives.

Riverbed's award-winning Steelhead appliances are a new generation of IT infrastructure products that accelerate enterprise applications by up to 100 times between enterprise datacenters and remote offices. The Steelhead appliance's intelligent optimizations give companies that share data and collaborate between distributed offices the best performance for the broadest range of applications that are important to their businesses, completely changing the way distributed IT is designed, deployed, used and managed.

Unlike competing approaches that are built primarily on either a network-compression or storage (caching) philosophy (like many WAFS-only architectures), Steelhead appliances are based on the Riverbed Optimization Systems (RiOS) that optimizes bandwidth for all TCP-based applications, including common applications like Windows file sharing, MAPI, Microsoft SQL and DPM, NetApp's SnapMirror, Symantec's NetBackup and FTP, while adding incremental application-specific latency optimizations to minimize the impact of latency on key applications.

Riverbed's intelligent optimizations also enable remote office IT consolidation, WAN bandwidth optimization and acceleration of data replication and backup.

Riverbed Technology, Inc. is the performance leader in wide-area data services (WDS) solutions. By enabling application performance over the wide area network (WAN) that is orders of magnitude faster than what users experience today, Riverbed is changing the way people work, and enabling a distributed workforce that can collaborate as if they were local. The Wall Street Journal named Riverbed the winner of its 2005 Technology Innovation Award in the Network/ Broadband/Internet category. In addition, InfoWorld has named Riverbed's Steelhead appliance "Technology of the Year" in both 2005 and 2006, as the "Best WAN Accelerator". Riverbed's award-winning solutions are available worldwide from resellers who are members of the Riverbed Partner Network, from Riverbed OEM partners, or directly from Riverbed.

Riverbed Technology, Riverbed, Steelhead and the Riverbed logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.

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For more information, visit www.riverbed.com.

Media Contact:

Kim Kapustka
(415) 344 4476
kim@riverbed.com

 

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