Riverbed Revs Up SaaS Applications with Accelerator

Riverbed is on a mission to improve the performance of SaaS applications and enhance the end-user experience with its new Riverbed SaaS Accelerator, announced Wednesday. The vendor also announced updates to its Digital Performance Platform and SD-WAN.

Getting top billing is the SaaS Accelerator, a cloud-based solution for SaaS performance management that boosts application performance by 10 times, the supplier said. Riverbed partners and customers will also be on the receiving end of SD-WAN enhancements that improve business agility, network security and application performance, and advances in the Digital Experience Management (DEM).

“The SaaS Accelerator is a cloud-based service that delivers significant application performance to insure a consistently reliable user experience no matter where an employee is sitting in the world, accessing their enterprise SaaS applications,” Alison Hubbard, senior director, product marketing at Riverbed, told Channel Futures.

Hubbard cites a recent survey, done by ESG on behalf of Riverbed, that found 42% of enterprises reported that half of their workforces suffer consistently poor experiences with their core SaaS applications.

The new SaaS Accelerator offers out-of-the-box support for O365, Salesforce, Box, ServiceNow and Veeva, an application that’s popular among pharmaceutical companies. Expect to see Riverbed announce support for Workday and Microsoft Dynamics soon, and additional application support in the future.

Gartner’s forecasts SaaS revenue to reach $113.1B by 2021, up from $85.1B in 2019. SaaS represents the largest segment of the cloud market, with expected growth of nearly 18% this year

Riverbed’s Alison Hubbard

“As part of a security posture where application latency can become a big problem that hinders the performance of those applications for workers, this is especially important because we work within that security posture backbone infrastructure, yet still eliminate the latency,” said Hubbard.

For Riverbed partners, it helps them deliver relevant solutions to their customers as they bring more SaaS applications into their businesses.

“Additionally, for Riverbed partners selling end-user experience management or are building out an Aternity digital experience management practice to quantify performance, the SaaS Accelerator can enable them to double their revenue and augment their revenues with incremental technologies they didn’t think to sell before, but is an obvious add-on to the Aternity platform,” said Hubbard.

Service Hub is the new enhancement to Riverbed’s SteelConnect and SteelHead SD, the vendor’s SD-WAN solutions. It provides a single, unified orchestration and connectivity fabric across the entire distributed enterprise network with embedded security, optimization and visibility​. This release boosts agility, security and operation efficiency with advances in multicloud network automation, enhanced service-chaining for on-premises and cloud-based security services, and increased flexibility to deploy and manage SD-WAN in complex global environments.

Riverbed’s Joshua Dobies

“We continue to expand our capabilities for cloud automation, especially where branch locations would like to directly access infrastructure-as-a-service environments without having to be backhauled through a data center, which is common today,” said Joshua Dobies, vice president, product marketing at Riverbed.

The third piece of news is advancements to Riverbed’s DEM solution that automates employee workstation remediation for common hardware problems.

“What we’re doing with this announcement is doing more with our monitoring information to help companies not only identify issues that need troubleshooting, but also making sure they’re avoided all together, where possible,” said Erik Hille, director, product marketing at Riverbed.

Riverbed also is using existing network telemetry information to provide a security analytics module to identify security breaches, such as DDos attacks, that already may be inside the company.