Riverbed Extends Scale and Flexibility for Managed Service Providers by Virtualizing Central Management Console

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - August 10, 2009) - Riverbed Technology RVBD, the IT infrastructure performance company for networks, applications and storage, today introduced its Central Management Console - Virtual Edition (CMC-VE) designed for managed service providers (MSPs). CMC-VE gives MSPs a multi-tenant solution to manage multiple sets of Steelhead® appliance deployments, each dedicated to a discrete customer. As a result, MSPs can scale central management capabilities for their customers as they grow and easily bring on new customers -- without purchasing and deploying new hardware.

CMC-VE is a virtualized version of the Central Management Console (CMC) appliance, which helps enterprises simplify the process of deploying, configuring and managing hundreds or even thousands of Steelhead appliances. The new capabilities of CMC-VE allow MSPs to reduce operational costs, improve visibility, easily scale and flexibly allocate management licenses to enterprise customers through its new multi-tenant capabilities. CMC-VE runs on VMWare ESX, and MSPs can run it on any existing server that has capacity.

"Our enterprise customers trust us to manage their network infrastructure, and WAN optimization is a critical component to our mutual success," said Jamey Hancock, Director of Channel Strategies for IPsoft, Inc, a global managed IT service provider. "We're using CMC to manage our customers' Steelhead appliance deployments in the easiest, most-efficient way possible. CMC-VE's capabilities allow us to improve visibility across customers' networks and provide valuable performance information, with greater flexibility and lower TCO for us and for them."

Managed WAN Optimization -- Reducing Capex and Opex

Enterprises that deploy managed services often reduce both their capital and operating expenditures. By taking advantage of WAN optimization as a managed service, enterprises can optimize their bandwidth usage while simultaneously consolidating their IT infrastructure, which reduces their IT complexity and overhead.

Increased Scale: Multi-Tenant Platform

With CMC-VE, MSPs will be able to take advantage of the capabilities and efficiency of central management for Steelhead appliance deployments across multiple customers. The number of CMC-VE instances and Steelhead appliances that can be managed on a single physical server varies, and depends on each individual MSP's environment. In one scenario, based on internal tests, one reasonably-sized server was able to run up to 50 CMC-VE instances, each of which was managing 50 Steelhead appliances. In another scenario, also based on internal tests, the same server hosted six CMC-VE instances, each managing 500 Steelhead appliances, meaning 3,000 appliances were being managed from one physical server.

Flexible Licensing

CMC-VE allows MSPs to allocate management licenses among customers as business needs change. Flexible licensing enables MSPs to purchase additional management licenses for Steelhead appliances as needed, and move existing license keys across CMC-VE instances. This gives MSPs a license pool that they can grow and allocate across customers as their needs change. Consequently, with CMC-VE, MSPs will be able to re-allocate licenses to a customer whose needs have grown faster than anticipated.

"The CMC-VE will allow us to deliver and manage application acceleration services to more enterprise customers, and multiple CMC-VE instances can be deployed on one server without additional hardware costs and operational requirements," said Wilfred Kwan, Chief Technology Officer, Pacnet. "Customers will also benefit from the added visibility into the performance of their service."

"By introducing a multi-tenant platform and flexible licensing, MSPs can manage thousands of Steelhead appliances across multiple customer sites -- all from one physical server in their data center. In addition, CMC-VE can be deployed almost instantly when an MSP brings on a new customer -- without having to deploy additional hardware," said Alan Saldich, vice president of product marketing, Riverbed®. "CMC-VE allows us to address managed service provider needs by providing them with the flexibility and scalability to improve their service margins and reduce operational costs."

CMC-VE is expected to be generally available in October 2009.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed's products and services, statements regarding performance results of Riverbed solutions that may suggest likely or certain outcomes, and statements relating to Riverbed's ability to meet the needs of distributed organizations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; our ability to anticipate market needs or develop new or enhanced products to meet those needs; the adoption rate of our products; our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our distribution partners; our ability to compete in our industry; fluctuations in demand, sales cycles and prices for our products and services; shortages or price fluctuations in our supply chain; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Riverbed's business are set forth in our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on July 30, 2009. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Any future product, feature or related specification that may be referenced in this release are for information purposes only and are not commitments to deliver any technology or enhancement. Riverbed reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time.

About Riverbed

Riverbed Technology is the IT infrastructure performance company. The Riverbed family of wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions liberates businesses from common IT constraints by increasing application performance, enabling consolidation, and providing enterprise-wide network and application visibility -- all while eliminating the need to increase bandwidth, storage or servers. Thousands of companies with distributed operations use Riverbed to make their IT infrastructure faster, less expensive and more responsive. Additional information about Riverbed RVBD is available at www.riverbed.com.

Riverbed Technology, Riverbed, Steelhead, RiOS, Interceptor, Think Fast, the Riverbed logo, Mazu, Profiler and Cascade are trademarks or registered trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.