Riverbed Updates SteelCentral, Teams with Zscaler

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Riverbed Technology on Thursday rolled out a new and enhanced version of SteelCentral and said it’s teaming up with Zscaler to offer a joint solution.

The new SteelCentral release extends Digital Experience Management (DEM) capabilities from the end user back to the network; expands DevOps performance management; and advances network performance management (NPM) in big-data enterprises.

More specifically, the product upgrades extend DEM capabilities by:

“Many organizations do not understand how all the infrastructure, networks, apps cloud and end-user device elements of their environment impact end-user experience, while being tasked to become faster and more agile in delivering critical digital services to customers and employees,” said Mike Sargent, senior vice president and general manager of SteelCentral at Riverbed. “The latest release of SteelCentral furthers our vision in being able to provide the comprehensive visibility needed to optimize the performance of the entire digital-service chain and achieve business growth.”

Riverbed’s Erik Hille

Riverbed says digital transformation is underway at many organizations, noting that 48 percent of companies are using digital to create new revenue streams, in turn driving performance expectations.

“Companies are adding new customer-service initiatives, employee-service initiatives, and even partner-service initiatives in order to streamline efficiencies or create new revenue opportunities for the company,” Erik Hille, product marketing manager, SteelCentral, at Riverbed, told us. However, only 34 percent of companies don’t understand how well things are working from the employee or customer perspective.

With today’s release of SteelCentral, Riverbed’s goal is ensure the performance of digital services and optimize the end-user experience. There’s an opportunity for partners as well.

“We feel like this new release is opening up a lot of new opportunities for existing partners to advance what they’re doing in the network-performance management space, but also, in some cases, reposition around digital transformation, which is a major area of investment for a lot of companies,” added Hille.

Resellers who tend to focus on application-performance monitoring (APM) and NPM — sometimes separately, other times together, will benefit from …

… the new version of SteelCentral, Hille said.

“Each of these map to trends going on in the industry such as improved DevOps, more granular analysis between the end user and the network performance, and of course, the large-scale data transformations that are happening in the NPM space. These trends are ones that resellers can attach to and help drive their own business,” he said. Additionally, he noted that resellers are becoming experts in both APM and NPM, filling the knowledge gap in companies where APM and NPM teams are still working in silos.

One Riverbed partner, Teneo, is taking the capabilities that Riverbed products offer and is packaging them into a service offering, delivering managed visibility as a service, for example.

On another new front, Riverbed and Zscaler, a cloud security vendor, today announced a no-security compromise solution for internet broadband-based transport to branch and remote offices, promoting accelerated cloud adoption for enterprises. The integrated solution brings together Riverbed’s SteelConnect and Zscaler’s cloud-security platform.

“Typically, at the branch office, some companies would have MPLS circuits. This will now allow internet broadband as well and accelerate their adoption of the cloud, ensuring that you’re not compromising the security of the distributed network even if you’re adopting more internet — because you can push the traffic into the Zscaler cloud,” Milind Bhise, senior director of product marketing at Riverbed, told Channel Partners.

How it works?

SteelConnect automates the discovery of connections to the nearest Zscaler data center and dynamically chooses the optimal point of presence (POP) for use for each site in the SteelConnect network. Automation eliminates the need for manual configuration of the network.

Other benefits of the integrated SteelConnect and Zscaler solution include: increased agility; pre-populated ZENs in SteelConnection Manager; dynamic discovery of new ZENs; automated secure connection to the most optimal ZEN based on latency; and automatic failover from primary to secondary ZEN enhances the robustness of the network, the vendors said.