December 18, 2009 09:00 ET

Riverbed Named Q309 Advanced Platform WAN Optimization Controller Market Share Leader by Leading Analyst Firm

Riverbed Grows Global Market Share in WAN Application Acceleration Equipment; Continues With Product Innovation for Cloud Environments

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - December 18, 2009) - Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the IT infrastructure performance company for networks, applications and storage, today announced that Gartner has identified Riverbed® in its recent December 2009 report, "Market Share: Application Acceleration Equipment, Worldwide 3Q09," as the WOC (WAN optimization controller) Advanced Platform (AP) worldwide market share leader for 3Q 2009 based on revenue. According to Gartner's market share report, Riverbed increased its revenue share from the previous quarter by 1.8 percentage points, to 34.3%.

Enterprises leverage Riverbed WAN optimization to improve remote and mobile employee productivity, enable private clouds, and provide enterprise-wide network and application visibility. By speeding the performance of applications between remote offices, private data centers and mobile workers, in some cases by up to 100 times, Riverbed Steelhead® products enable companies to consolidate IT, improve backup and replication processes to ensure data integrity, and improve staff productivity and collaboration. Nearly 7,000 customers, across a wide range of markets, have implemented Riverbed WAN optimization solutions in their geographically dispersed organizations.

In a separate report published in June 2009 by Gartner, Riverbed was positioned in the leaders quadrant in the "Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controller (WOC), 2009" authored by Andy Rolfe, Joe Skorupa and Severine Real. According to Gartner, "Leaders exhibit an ability to shape the market by introducing additional capabilities in their product offerings and by raising awareness of the importance of these features. We expect a Leader to be growing the market as a whole, and to have solutions that resonate with an increasing number of enterprises. Leaders in the WOC market need to have a broad feature set, including QoS, generic compression, protocol acceleration and file system acceleration, with the majority of features proven in substantial real-world implementations. They also need to be able to offer sales and support on a global basis." To download the report, compliments of Riverbed, visit: http://www.riverbed.com/lg/whitepaper-gartner-2009.php?CID=70170000000IqIo.

Riverbed: Expanding Solutions in 2010

Riverbed WAN optimization allows organizations to overcome the performance barrier to successfully consolidating IT infrastructure into private clouds. In 2010, Riverbed will begin to introduce solutions that extend the benefits of acceleration to applications and storage in the public cloud.

"Our success is a testament to our ability to align technology innovation with customer requirements, which have expanded to include overcoming performance barriers in different types of cloud environments -- including private, hybrid and public," said Eric Wolford, senior vice president of business development and marketing at Riverbed. "Our solution is a critical component in developing a cost-effective and efficient IT infrastructure because we enable organizations to successfully consolidate, virtualize and accelerate data and applications anywhere in the world -- even thousands of miles away -- without experiencing performance problems."

Speeding Application Performance in the Cloud

Building on its success in enabling organizations large and small to build private clouds, Riverbed recently unveiled its cloud direction, including the upcoming virtual Steelhead for the cloud, which will extend the benefits of Riverbed WAN optimization by accelerating the performance of applications and data transfers across private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Accelerating Cloud Storage

Similar to how Riverbed addressed fundamental protocol inefficiencies for applications (used over the WAN) that resulted in order of magnitude performance gains, Riverbed will release advanced new technology that addresses fundamental protocol inefficiencies for block storage protocols that again produce order of magnitude performance gains over the WAN. What was deemed impossible before -- running any block protocol over the WAN -- will be possible with this new technology. This new innovation enables thousands of miles of separation between storage and compute resources, transforming the WAN into a SAN.

"We continue to grow our product leadership as we ensure high-performance access to applications and storage. As customers embrace the adoption of private, public and hybrid cloud models and their users move further from their data, we are raising the bar for delivering innovative solutions to meet their needs," said Wolford.

About the Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2009 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed's products and services, statements about market share results for Q3 2009 that may suggest trends for our business, statements of the plans, strategies and objectives of Riverbed management regarding future products and product plans, statements regarding the growth characteristics of, and customer demand relating to, the WAN optimization and cloud markets, statements regarding Riverbed's ability to grow the cloud market, statements regarding performance results of Riverbed solutions that may suggest likely or certain outcomes, and statements relating to Riverbed's ability to meet the needs of distributed organizations, grow or retain market share or grow the market as a whole. 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 30, 2009. 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 Technology is the IT infrastructure performance company. The Riverbed family of wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions liberates businesses from common IT constraints by increasing application performance, enabling consolidation, and providing enterprise-wide network and application visibility -- all while eliminating the need to increase bandwidth, storage or servers. Thousands of companies with distributed operations use Riverbed to make their IT infrastructure faster, less expensive and more responsive. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com.

Riverbed Technology, Riverbed, Steelhead, RiOS, Interceptor, Think Fast, the Riverbed logo, Mazu, Profiler and Cascade are trademarks or registered trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.