Designed to overcome visibility blind spots around public cloud, remote work environments, and Zero Trust and SD-WAN architectures, the new platform, the first major initiative from new CEO Dave Donatelli, also adds modules like NPM+ and the Aternity Mobile monitoring solution.
Alex Thurber, SVP Global Partners and Alliances at Riverbed
AI Observability vendor Riverbed has introduced a new AI-powered observability platform to optimize digital experiences that is based on open architecture, and which is designed to help IT to overcome visibility blind spots around public cloud, remote work environments, and Zero Trust and SD-WAN architectures. Concurrently, the company also launched several new solutions and a unified agent built on this architecture. These includes the Aternity Mobile monitoring solution which lets IT teams monitor enterprise-owned Apple iOS and Android mobile device performance to identify digital experience issues and take targeted actions. NPM+ is the SaaS-delivered service that overcomes those visibility blind spots. Riverbed also released the Riverbed IQ 2.0, the latest version of their AIOps service.
The new platform is the brainchild of new Riverbed CEO Dave Donatelli, who came to Riverbed from Oracle, and who is also well known for lengthy tenures at HPE and EMC before that.
“He has been here for six months, coming here in July after our acquisition by Vector Capital, and this has been his big push,” said Alex Thurber, SVP Global Partners and Alliances at Riverbed. “His first huge focus was on engineering, to deliver a roadmap that would put us in front of the market. That was followed by a true end-to-end Go-to-Market strategy. We have completely changed our GTM. “Our direct touch reps have named accounts, but the rest is channel.”
That channel component is close to 90%, Thurber said.
“With this open platform, partners can then add their own secret sauce, and there’s a great deal of billable hours and consulting for them,” he added.
The network blind spots and shortage of skilled IT resources make it difficult for customers to collect and analyze all the available data, and leverage AI and automation to meet the needs of modern IT operations.
“What we are trying to help customers with is move from reactive to proactive to predictive – get out and front of a problem and solve it before the customer even knows there was a glitch,” Thurber said. “This will significantly cut IT costs and improve their digital experience.”
The new open Riverbed platform will launch with approximately 35 pre-built application and software integrations.
“We very consciously designing this as an open technology to make it easier to work with additional data, as well as with a number of reporting tools like ServiceNow,” Thurber stated. “We will continue to work with additional tools out there, including competitors, and we will be adding more of them. We have 22 years of understanding how things move around on the network, and understanding the end-to-end flow of data, and how it feeds into our end-to-end user experience. We also cover mobile as well.”
The new Riverbed Unified Agent is designed to streamline the deployment and management of visibility solutions with a single agent. It also adds SaaS-delivered visibility modules such as Aternity for AI-driven insights for end user experience monitoring and NPM+ for network and cloud monitoring.
“A huge problem today is agent flow, which led to customers like a UK medical facility taking over 20 minutes to boot, which we have significantly reduced,” Thurber said. “NPM+ – stops companies from losing sight of the data, by letting it all be run into a tunnel. Both Aternity and NPM+ are becoming modules in Unified Agent.
Also new is Topology Viewer, for generating dynamic mapping of connected devices and showing dependencies within evolving and dynamic IT landscapes.
“It has some components of other techs, but it is a new tool, which is very slick,” Thurber said. “It gives visibility even through Zero Trust architecture.”
The Company also released the next generation of Riverbed IQ 2.0, an AIOps service, which reduces alert fatigue and enables IT to identify and solve issues faster by using AI-driven correlation and automation of Riverbed and third-party data.
