Observability Solutions Often Fall Woefully Short, So Riverbed Has Unique Strategy

Riverbed has launched a broad strategy to bring unified observability to customers worldwide and accelerate growth. The company’s strategy is centered around the development of an expanded unified observability portfolio. This will bring together data, insights and actions to solve one of the industry’s most daunting problems. This, of course, is how to provide seamless and secure digital experiences in a hybrid world. This new landscape of course includes highly distributed users and applications, exploding data and soaring IT complexity. 

Riverbed also launched a new brand identity, including the introduction of Alluvio by Riverbed (for unified observability). This is meant to reflect the evolution of the company and technology. It also reflects the strong market momentum as evidenced by over 30% year-over-year bookings growth. 

A New Chapter

Riverbed’s Dan Smoot

“This marks an exciting new chapter for Riverbed,” said Dan Smoot, Riverbed president and CEO. “We’re capitalizing on our trusted brand, the dynamic growth, and market momentum for our visibility solutions to position Riverbed as a dominant leader in the rapidly growing observability market. Through our vision to deliver a highly innovative, differentiated SaaS-based Unified Observability portfolio, we will meet an urgent customer need and disrupt the market. We are focused on helping our customers transform massive amounts of data into actionable insights, so they can drive enterprise performance and deliver exceptional digital experiences.”

Riverbed’s Alex Thurber

“Riverbed is disrupting the market with an approach to observability,” Alex Thurber, senior vice president of global partners and alliances at Riverbed, told Channel Futures. “This approach unifies data, insights and actions across IT to enable our customers to deliver a seamless digital experience. By drawing on Riverbed’s experience in understanding how data flows across enterprises, then adding cutting edge capabilities, we’re creating a completely new set of solutions. Solutions that move us from visibility to unified observability and enables customers to deliver on user’s digital expectations in a complex, hybrid IT world.”

Thurber says that partners are absolutely key to this vision. 

“Our partners know the customer, know what they need, and manage those crucial relationships,” Thurber continues. “We want to provide everything our partners need to take advantage of our unified observability vision to sell into this market.” 

Market Opportunity and Data Challenge

Industry and financial analysts estimate the observability market will reach approximately $19 billion in 2024. Drivers of this growth include the shifts to hybrid work and networks, multicloud environments and modern application architectures. Moreover, these shifts make it hard for IT to extract actionable insights from data and proactively manage performance using existing tools.

Three in four business decision-makers say their organizations struggle to glean actionable insights from data that is generated by their technology infrastructure. That’s according to according to Riverbed’s Hybrid Work Global Survey. Even further, IT still relies on siloed tools to manage performance and user experience. They are also overwhelmed by massive amounts of disparate data and alerts that provide little context or actionable insights.

Observability is meant to solve these problems, but current solutions fall woefully short. A lot of observability tools limit or sample data rather than capture everything. This leaves IT blind to potential issues or opportunities for proactive improvement. Even so-called “full-stack” observability solutions fail to capture all relevant user, network, and application telemetry. This means IT can’t effectively troubleshoot problems at scale for today’s complex, hybrid, and distributed infrastructures.

Addressing the Challenge

To address this industry challenge, Riverbed has invested and focused the company’s R&D efforts in the last year. From this, it has developed technology and what it says is a unique approach to unified observability that is comprehensive, unified and easy-to-operate. Alluvio by Riverbed, the company’s Unified Observability software portfolio, has been given a boost. It aims to provide IT with a unified view. This is meant to clear the fog and reduce complexity, and transform data into actionable insights. This is across the entire digital ecosystem with automated self-healing. This will enable organizations to provide seamless digital experiences, ones that drive enterprise performance for both the employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX).

The portfolio includes Riverbed’s visibility tools for network performance management (NPM), IT infrastructure monitoring (ITIM) and digital experience management (DEM). This encompasses application performance management (APM) and end user experience monitoring (EUEM).

Riverbed will begin a beta for a SaaS-based Alluvio unified observability solution in May. Look for a general release later this year. Several organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, are trialing the solution. During said trials, they are providing valuable, positive feedback.