Riverbed Unveils New Version of SteelCentral Platform

Riverbed Technology is aiming to help enterprise users more easily monitor their network infrastructure with the latest release of its SteelCentral Platform, the company’s integrated performance management solution.

Managing half a dozen or more different application monitoring solutions can be hard work, especially for companies who are tight on personnel or lack a dedicated infrastructure management team. With SteelCentral, Riverbed is seeking to condense these tasks into a single modular console so IT can monitor all aspects of their applications from a central location.

Platform integration is the name of the game for Riverbed’s latest SteelCentral release, with all of the new capabilities seeking to provide additional collaborative troubleshooting capabilities to administrators. Riverbed Vice President of Marketing for SteelCentral Nik Koutsoukos said the new additions to the platform continue the company’s mission of providing users with a one-stop shop for all of their infrastructure monitoring needs.

“The goal here is for us to develop and market a platform that acts as a command center for application performance,” said Koutsoukos in an interview with The VAR Guy. “There’s only one way to stay on top of application performance – by having a solution that comprehensively captures the data and blends it to give you a single view of application performance as opposed to having to manually collect and make sense of the data.”

Straight from the press release, new features include:

1. Expanded network and application visibility

2. Improved End-to-End Application Transaction Monitoring

3. Cost Improvements for Web Application and WAN-Optimization Monitoring

Riverbed is also working to change the mindset of application management specialists with SteelCentral by emphasizing a unified platform rather than the continued use of siloed solutions, according to Koutsoukos.

“An increasing number of clients now realize that they’ve got to work better together. We have to try and at least break down the silos… and at least make sure there is information flowing from one [piece] to the other,” he said. “The strength of the platform comes from the fact that the more you deploy, the more integration you are going to have between the tools. Each of these tools speak to each other and allows [users] to make sense of problems that could be lying between the network and the application.”

The latest version of SteelCentral is available now, with the platform starting at $20,000 for entry-level deployments. Additional modules can be added as needed based on a company’s specific level of need.