Brief

Riverbed leverages technology & channel to drive growth

Riverbed, a WAN Optimization solutions provider, is consolidating its channel structure while leveraging the emerging technology innovations to drive business growth.

In an effort to strengthen its present in this space and garner a better market share, Riverbed is consolidating its channel plans. While avoiding any over distribution, Riverbed’s regional direction Vivek Singh has opted for a two tier channel structure. Working with global partners like HP ProCurve, Microsoft, British Telecom, AT&T, Orange etc., the vendor has a distribution model driving through value added resellers.

“While we have 25 value added resellers driving our products and solutions, we have appointed Bangalore based Select Technologies (WeP Solutions) as our distributor,” said Singh. Riverbed has just roped in HCL Comnet as its partner to target industry verticals.

Having its Steelhead appliances as its flag ship product, Singh observes tremendous growth potential for this technology. He is encouraged by the analysts’ projections on the WAN optimization technology which is expected to exceed $200 million in 2008, while the hardware-based market to exceed $1 billion, with India being a key absorber. With the workforce becoming increasingly mobile and remote, the challenge of extending application delivery network to individuals increases, driving more application performance.

Other encouraging factor that Singh finds is the growth in mobile market and IDC’s estimates on this find about 67% of workforce will be having remote offices, where WAN optimization solutions become imperative.

Singh finds Indian customer’s approach towards saving bandwidth cost, accelerate applications and IT consolidation efforts would drive growth for WAN. Singh maintained, “Another factor which can drive growth for this technology is the return on investment of our Steelhead products.”

According to Singh, as per IDC, per every $20,000 invested, major savings would be on user productivity, followed by hardware software, bandwidth, IT staff and IT efficiency.

Having about 5,500 customers worldwide, Riverbed has 250 customers in India and has added 55 new customers in the recent past. The verticals that the vendor targets include architecture / Engineering / Construction, manufacturing, software developers, sales and distribution companies, financial services, healthcare, law firms, media & entertainment, defense and hospitality.

Singh finds these solutions easy to sell for partners as it is user friendly and not much sales and technical training needed.

“WAN solutions are sold as an appliance and hence it is just plug and play, it can be sold as a service tool and it is creating new opportunity as a storage solution,” remarked Singh.

Being Riverbed’s value added distributor, Bangalore based Select Technologies (WeP Solutions is penetrating into the market through its 50 solution partners.

Singh also informs that Riverbed has intensified its marketing efforts through other partnerships like OEM alliance with Microsoft and HP ProCurve.

According to Raghu Setlur, GM, WeP Solutions, WAN optimization is perfectly suited for the current recessionary period where the customers could observe a major cut in their operational expense by deploying it. He pointed out that customers can see value in lowering total cost of ownership using this technology. “Having such technology in our portfolio would ensure better hold on the customers as we would help them in having optimum utilization of their resources,” he added.

Riverbed intends to target industries including banking, finance, telecom, government, defense, engineering, mining, and manufacturing, among others through WeP Sol’s channel partners. WeP has 22 customers and about 55 Riverbed units installed till date. The distributor is increasing its feet on street with more resources across its eight offices to push Riverbed products. “We are targeting about 200 units of application acceleration product installations in this year,” informed Setlur.

From the support point of view, Riverbed has roped in Choice Logistics as its RMA partner.

—N Geetha