Networking

On an upturn

Where does Riverbed go beyond WAN optimisation? You are a dominant player, but the danger is that you become a one-trick pony. How do you expand the scope of this business?

What we're really doing is Layer 7 application acceleration, and that has much deeper implications than simply making a particular land line faster and cheaper than it was. It's something that changes the nature of global IT infrastructure for every major company in the world. Everyone likes a fast line. It was attractive to people because it saves them bandwidth. It's much cheaper to do optimisation and compression across the network than to buy bigger links. But then we saw people doing data centre consolidation with it, which is moving all the server and IT infrastructure out of branch offices, out of multiple data centres into just one or two. That trend has driven a lot of our growth in the last three years. Our products make that possible because you can't do data centre consolidation unless you can give reasonable performance to the people who no longer have local servers.

We woke up one morning about six months ago to discover — wait a minute — what we're doing is creating private clouds, because what data centre consolidation does is the creation of a private cloud. So, in fact, we've actually penetrated the cloud market.

The further implication is that if you have to have our technology to do private clouds, well, guess what, you can't do public clouds without it either. The biggest companies in the world — the biggest service providers, the biggest systems integrators, the biggest Fortune 100 companies — are coming to Riverbed to ask us 'how do we do our cloud infrastructure into the future?'.

Cisco started out in the multiprotocol router business and expanded into many other areas, including switching, storage, security and more. Should we expect to see a similar, diverse growth track and expansion plan for Riverbed?

Cisco is the Layer 2 and 3 of networking, but the action now is less at Layer 2 and 3 and much more Layers 4 through 7. Cisco's the king of 2 and 3 and we're the king of 4 through 7.

We just have a huge future for ourselves. We bring the capability customers could only dream about, that no one thought was ever possible, and here we are delivering it. There is a big product future, revenue future, for us. We're a strategic partner. I talk to CIOs all the time now, and the importance of having knowledge workers connect to their applications effectively, cheaply, globally, seamlessly, 24-7, is critical for them. That's what we do. That gives us an incredible position going into the next decade.

Where could the company go in that Layer 4 through 7 realm?

Our big concentration now is the edge of computing, the branch offices where a lot of the workers are. But there's an interesting thing happening with data centre consolidation and cloud computing. The old paradigm was the corporate headquarters was where the corporate data centre was, and all the branch offices were the edge. What's happening now is the corporate data centre is being moved to a cloud somewhere else. It's in Wyoming or Arizona. What that means is that the corporate headquarters is now part of the edge. Having the headquarters join the edge increases our market opportunity.

We introduced a product about a year ago called Riverbed Services Platform (a virtual server environment on Riverbed's Steelhead appliances that allows you to plug in five other software modules of services you would place in your branch office. We're approaching the ability to give people that dream of the one-box in the branch office. You don't need a separate box to run your Windows server anymore, or really any other server in your branch office. That becomes the beachhead of a very big market. Into that single box you can plug in your security, your media server, your media streaming, your DNS, DHCP, domain controller, your print server, your Microsoft Windows server, anything you want. That becomes a large ancillary and synergistic market. That's the edge.

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