In case you missed it this week, Riverbed had a significant technology and innovation launch, rolling out a new platform along with several new or enhanced solutions designed to optimize experiences and drive operational efficiencies. In this launch, Riverbed unveiled its AI-powered, open observability platform, supported by a new unified agent, data store, and topology viewer. If that wasn’t enough innovation, the launch also included several other new solutions including Riverbed Aternity Mobile, Riverbed NPM+, Riverbed IQ 2.0, and an enhanced Riverbed NetProfiler.
My first take on this launch is one of a company level. Riverbed has been in business for a couple of decades and has always remained focused on delivering high-fidelity data across the networking and application domains. However, over time those technologies were separated. Now that both those technologies are together again, it is great to see the integration and innovation accelerating to deliver even more value to its customers.
The launch of the Riverbed Platform and these new capabilities is well timed. Enterprises are distributing modern applications across private data centers, multiple public clouds, and edge locations. Because services can be spun up and down in just a few seconds, it is important that all the network and application data is collected, correlated, and analyzed to provide insights into the services and business.
The new Riverbed Observability Platform enables organizations to have a complete picture of their end-to-end environment, and more importantly, the data it needs to power AI models to drive greater operational efficiencies. The new Riverbed Unified Agent will reduce complexity and CPU overhead as it supports all Riverbed products, reducing the number of data collectors that need to be deployed and simplifying lifecycle management. It is imperative to have a comprehensive, real-time view into these highly complex and dynamic environments and the new Topology Viewer enables organizations to visualize highly dynamic environments and provide context for the collected data. To ensure all the collected data can be leveraged where and when it is needed, the Riverbed Data Store was built to support operations and AI model development.
Riverbed Aternity Mobile extends visibility into mobile devices, including Apple iOS and Android. Given that most employees work in a hybrid manner, splitting time between the office and remote, having visibility into user devices will enable IT operations to eliminate a blind spot and ensure consistently positive experiences regardless of location.
A new SaaS-delivered solution Riverbed NPM+ provides network packet visibility and will collect data from user and server endpoints to provide granular visibility into public clouds, remote users, or ZeroTrust encrypted environments. By collecting decrypted data operations teams will have the requisite visibility and still retain a high level of security.
To address the visibility gap in WAN environments, Riverbed NetProfiler has been enhanced to monitor SD-WAN technologies for leading solutions that include Cisco and VeloCloud. As previously mentioned, these highly distributed environments utilize SD-WAN links to connect users and applications, and therefore visibility into these environments is a must-have capability.
And of course, given the need to drive greater operational efficiencies in this complex and distributed environment, AIOps is becoming a required tool for operations teams. Riverbed did not disappoint in this category either, launching Riverbed IQ 2.0 – a SaaS-based AIOps service. This service leverages all the data collected by Riverbed and has over 170 pre-built remediations and application integration right out of the box.
One area that was mentioned in the press release, but is worth further mention is the fact that this platform is built on an open architecture and it underscores Riverbed’s commitment to ecosystem partners. The Riverbed platform already supports numerous integrations so organizations can streamline things like ticketing and workflow with ServiceNow or extend visibility into all the big public cloud providers just to name a few. The Riverbed platform also enables 3rd party data to be ingested or the ability to deliver its correlated information northbound.
Riverbed’s platform is also modular, giving the customers the flexibility to start with NPM or Aternity that you may already have deployed, and then utilizing the same agents, and the same AI engine, you can continue to add capabilities.
Ultimately, all of the innovations announced in this launch are about enabling organizations to have greater visibility and deliver enhanced experiences. By leveraging the Riverbed AI-driven platform organizations will also reduce complexity, drive operational efficiency, and accelerate business growth.
