San Francisco — May 17, 2005— Riverbed Technology, the performance leader in application acceleration on wide area networks, today announced that it has signed a worldwide OEM agreement with HP regarding Riverbed’s Wide Area Data Services (WDS) software. The core technology in Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances, WDS software will form the basis for the new HP StorageWorks Enterprise File Service (EFS) WAN Accelerator, which will be marketed through HP’s direct sales force and worldwide system of resellers, integrators and other technology partners.

“Riverbed is extremely pleased to be part of this OEM agreement with HP, one of the world’s leading providers of enterprise IT infrastructure,” said Jerry M. Kennelly, co-founder and CEO of Riverbed. “Now Riverbed’s customers can take advantage of HP’s global capability and world-class support and service organization for worldwide deployment and management of Riverbed’s WDS solution. In addition, this agreement makes the industry’s premier WDS solution available to HP customers who are working on site consolidation projects, simplification of global or remote office IT infrastructure, or application acceleration.”

Riverbed solves remote office application performance and file-sharing problems for companies around the world across a broad range of sectors. Riverbed is the only company that delivers a complete solution to wide area networking problems, by addressing all the key factors that slow application performance over WANs: high latency, limited bandwidth, and “chatty” transport and application protocols.

The HP StorageWorks EFS WAN Accelerator is a simple, transparent appliance solution that accelerates applications on wide-area networks (WANs) by up to 100 times. The solution is built on the industry-standard HP ProLiant server platform and can be easily integrated into any enterprise network and installed in less than ten minutes.

“Riverbed’s WDS technology is an important component in HP’s strategy for converging the networking, storage and server markets,” said Harry Baeverstad, director of Network Attached Storage, StorageWorks Division at HP. “Riverbed’s Steelhead software allows us to eliminate the complexity of deploying and managing multiple boxes from multiple vendors, while giving our customers the best WAN acceleration solution available.”

“This agreement between HP and Riverbed makes perfect sense,” said Zeus Kerravala, VP of enterprise infrastructure at The Yankee Group. “With the convergence of the WAN optimization and WAFS categories, and the rising importance of wide area networks within the enterprise, HP’s customers need a comprehensive solution. They will benefit greatly from having access to Riverbed’s market-leading WDS technology on HP’s hardware.”

Riverbed Steelhead™ appliances accelerate TCP-based applications on WANs by up to 100 times, and simultaneously expand bandwidth ten-fold, allowing geographically dispersed teams to run applications off central servers and share large documents as if they were all working in the same office. Such dramatic improvements in WAN performance enable CIOs to consolidate remote file servers and other infrastructure into centralized data centers where information can be managed more safely and easily. With Riverbed, companies can realize the benefits of consolidation – improved data security and compliance, and reduced operational costs – without sacrificing the performance their remote users demand.

Riverbed Technology is the pioneer in wide area data services (WDS), a fast-growing product category that solves the problems of latency and bandwidth that plague a wide variety of applications over distributed networks. Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances provide the highest level of WAN performance at a lower cost, reducing WAN traffic by up to 95% and accelerating applications by up to 100 times. By providing optimizations that are orders of magnitude greater than what users experience today, Riverbed is changing the way people work – and enabling, for the first time, a truly distributed workforce. InfoWorld named Steelhead a “Technology of the Year” for 2005 as the “Best WAN Accelerator.” Steelhead appliances are available worldwide directly from Riverbed and through global partners, including HP. Riverbed has received funding from Goldman Sachs, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and UV Partners.

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For more information, visit www.riverbed.com.

Media contacts:                                                                             

Alan Saldich
Riverbed Technology  
(415) 247-7308 
alan@riverbed.com

Kim Kapustka
K2pr
(650) 685-6342
kim@k2pr.com

 

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