SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Feb 1, 2012) - [ Riverbed Technology ] (NASDAQ: [ RVBD ]), the IT performance company, announced today that it is evolving its Steelhead® product family, which is used by thousands of global organizations to accelerate the performance of applications over the wide area network (WAN). The company that pioneered the WAN optimization market is introducing two new product series, Steelhead CX and Steelhead EX. The product families allow organizations to meet their top IT performance priorities, from accelerating application performance worldwide to completely consolidating remote office infrastructure into the data center.

"In an effort to simplify management, increase resource utilization and reduce costs, organizations have been actively consolidating and virtualizing IT environments into centralized data centers," said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "While these consolidation efforts provide numerous benefits, it is imperative that organizations ensure that these consolidated IT environments are adequately protected and available. Furthermore, these consolidation efforts can introduce inherent performance over distance challenges. Riverbed's® enhanced Steelhead product family enables organizations to centralize virtually all applications, driving down operational overhead and costs, yet still maintain high levels of availability and improve end-user satisfaction."

The Steelhead product family is powered by the Riverbed Operating System (RiOS®) software, which solves application performance problems to overcome bandwidth and geographical limitations to improve productivity and enable global collaboration. Enterprises utilizing Riverbed WAN optimization have reduced bandwidth consumption by 65% to 95% and accelerated application performance from five to 50x, even up to 100x in some cases. RiOS on the new appliances delivers the broadest set of optimizations available on platforms that are both easy to install and manage and provide industry-leading price/performance, allowing organizations to get more from their WAN optimization solution than ever before.

"While working with thousands of global organizations over the years, we've recognized a natural market segmentation. There are IT organizations that want WAN optimization for its core function -- to increase the performance of applications over the WAN for their distributed offices. There are other organizations that have a primary focus on consolidating their entire infrastructure," said Eric Wolford, executive vice president and GM, Products at Riverbed. "Our new high-performance product series meets the needs of both customer types."

Steelhead CX Series - Dedicated WAN Optimization Appliances
The Steelhead CX series, like its predecessors in the xx50 series, overcomes bandwidth and geographic limitations to make users more productive, data transfers faster, and applications perform seamlessly regardless of location. However, the Steelhead CX series of appliances offers more capacity and throughput than previous Steelhead appliances at the same total cost of ownership.

"Performance is paramount in our business. The speed at which our attorneys can access, modify and send documents is vital," said Sean Power, CIO at Lathrop and Gage. "I'm impressed by the evolution of the Steelhead product family; the new Steelhead appliances have more memory, processing power and throughput than previous models, as well as delivering RAID and dual power supplies as standard on each appliance. As Steelhead appliances have demonstrated their worth every day and cemented themselves into our network as key devices in our WAN performance strategy, this is exactly what I've been looking for from Riverbed."

Steelhead EX Series - Multi-function, Enterprise-class Branch Office Appliance
The Steelhead EX builds on Riverbed's award-winning WAN optimization solution, and adds to that a robust platform with more memory, disk, and CPU to support the Virtual Services Platform (VSP) and [ Granite ], which was introduced today. And, every appliance in the Steelhead EX series is supported by high-performance solid state drives (SSDs).

Branch Office Consolidation: Every Steelhead EX appliance features the VSP, similar to the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) that runs on the xx50 series, which has a dedicated platform that runs virtual services and enables greater consolidation in branch offices. With the VSP, each appliance is designed to leverage VMware virtualization technology to run virtualized instances of an organization's own services, including DNS, DHCP, Active Directory, print serving, streaming media, security service or 3^rd party software.

Remote Server and Storage Consolidation to the Data Center: The Steelhead EX series can also be upgraded to include Riverbed Granite™. This revolutionary new product enables a new architectural approach called edge virtual server infrastructure (edge-VSI) that does for edge servers what virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) did for desktops: it allows IT to consolidate and manage all edge servers in the data center. But unlike VDI, edge-VSI does this while delivering 20-50% lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

With Granite, global enterprises can achieve complete consolidation of edge applications, servers and storage to the data center, while delivering services to the edge of the enterprise as if they were local. Edge-VSI is complementary to WAN optimization, accelerating performance for applications and use cases not addressed by any WAN optimization approach today. Organizations that deploy Granite are expected to save up to 50% over traditional approaches to managing distributed infrastructure by eliminating costly backup and recovery processes in remote locations, consolidating underutilized edge servers and storage, and cutting many of the general IT administration costs including travel associated with managing infrastructure at the edge.

More than 16,000 organizations worldwide depend on Riverbed to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT infrastructure, through solutions that overcome performance issues caused by distance, distributed computing, and ever increasing amounts of data. As IT organizations embark on strategic initiatives to virtualize, consolidate and migrate workloads into cloud environments, users are moved farther from their data, and slow applications, file transfers and inefficient websites negatively impact the performance of these initiatives. Riverbed transforms IT performance by providing solutions spanning WAN optimization, application-aware network performance management (NPM), application delivery, web content optimization (WCO), and cloud data protection for backup, archive and disaster recovery. By providing the broadest portfolio of performance solutions that deliver anywhere, any application optimization, Riverbed enables organizations to increase productivity and efficiency, while enhancing business resilience and controlling costs.

Availability

Steelhead-CX and Steelhead-EX series are expected to be generally available this quarter.

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 and customer cost savings resulting from implementation 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 October 28, 2011. 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 delivers performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and intelligently implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performance. By giving enterprises the platform they need to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns with the business needs of the organization. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: [ RVBD ]) is available at [ www.riverbed.com ].

Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service name or logo used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners.