Riverbed launches a new SaaS solution on its own platform, bringing a state of the art solution to the market, on a platform that will eventually move beyond SaaS.
Today, Riverbed formally released Alluvio IQ, a new cloud-native, SaaS-delivered Unified Observability service that Riverbed first announced earlier this year. The first solution in the company’s new Unified Observability software product portfolio, called Alluvio by Riverbed, it empowers IT with actionable insights and intelligent automation to fix problems faster and improve digital service quality.
The move to unified observability reflects Riverbed’s response to shifting market forces over the last decade.
“We just had our 20 year anniversary, and we are one of those companies that helped created the modern internet,” said Alex Thurber, SVP Global Partners and Alliances at Riverbed, who has had senior channel-centric roles at many companies over the years. “With Steelhead, we took tenuous WAN links and made them better. We still continue to see a big interest in areas that don’t have high speed links, but in much of the world, the infrastructure has caught up – so in many areas there isn’t as much demand for acceleration as there was before.”
Alluvio IQ, on the other hand, provides a different type of value by leveraging full-fidelity network performance and end-user experience data across every transaction in the digital enterprise and applying AI and machine learning to contextually correlate data streams and alerts to identify the most business-impacting events.
“We use Alluvio IQ to feed our IQ business to provide actionable insight,” Thurber said. “Our beta customers are excited about it, particularly how we take all of this together and come up with a broader point.”
Observability is not new to Rivered, but in the past it has had more of a point product focus.
Alex Thurber, SVP Global Partners and Alliances at Riverbed
“We have had point products like Aternity Application Performance Monitoring, but this is our introduction into unified observability, where we actually help the customer fix what happens,” Thurber said. “We ship the solution with runbooks, but they are drag and drop, and very editable.”
The new service also focuses on letting IT organizations “shift left,” empowering junior staff to do the job of more experienced IT experts, freeing-up senior IT staff to focus on strategic business initiatives.
“We see shift left as a massage to the CFO as well as the CIO and the IT department,” Thurber said. “Too much of time is spent on grunt work. We will shift the grunt work left to more junior analysts where they can still do meaningful work.”
Riverbed is not the only company to have seen the potential of unified observability, and others, large and small, have moved into the area and with which Riverbed now competes.
“The market will tell us whether we have done this right or not,” Thurber said. “We are depending on our history and the knowledge base we have as a company. We are also depending on our Open API approach and integrations with our own technology. We bring all of these together with Alluvio IQ. We’ve been working with some very large customers. They really like what we are doing and they see us as unique. We have to maintain that.”
The platform is aimed at the top of the market, and the decision was made to provide these users with flexibility in response, instead of just remediating everything for them.
“Everyone talks about how awesome remediation is, and then there’s some confusion,” Thurber stated. “We give you the option to be as automated as you want to be. We are very focused on actionable insights.”
Thurber said that this offering will be a heavy channel product.
“As a company, we are 94% channel,” he indicated. “The reason I was hired is to make the channel more proactive and more strategic. Some of our channel is pure fulfillment. I have put in place the precursors of the next generation of our channel program. With Alluvio IQ, the channel play is the consultation. It’s a SaaS product, and the value is helping the customer build the run books and rolling it into their business process. Partners get that. There are lots of good opportunities in professional services and customer success that set them up to be a trusted advisor at another level.”
The Riverbed channel program is also being updated to fit the new Go-to-Market models.
“Our channel program is Rise, a two-tier reseller program but with the rebranding last April, it’s also being turned into a platform. You will see other elements on platform – like MSP and GSI components – but we are starting with SaaS.”
The SaaS platform will also be enhanced going forward
“This is the beginning of our SaaS platform,” Thurber said. “There will be other elements coming down the rod, as an advantage of SaaS is that we can add features almost as we go. The open API concept will be part of the launch tomorrow as well as the ability to snap in data collectors.”
