At Oracle CloudWorld 2025 in Las Vegas, Riverbed unveiled its new Data Express Service, a SaaS offering designed to address one of the biggest bottlenecks in enterprise AI adoption: AI data movement. This involves moving massive datasets quickly, securely, and cost-effectively. Built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the new service enables petabyte-scale data transfers up to 10 times faster than traditional solutions, reducing data movement times from months to days and dramatically improving time-to-value for AI initiatives.
As enterprises ramp up efforts to train, tune, and deploy large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI systems, the need to move vast quantities of data, often dispersed across hybrid environments, has become a critical barrier. Riverbed’s AI data movement announcement directly targets this pain point, pairing its decades of experience in data acceleration and WAN optimization with a next-generation, cloud-delivered architecture optimized for AI workloads.
Accelerating the AI Data Pipeline
According to Riverbed, organizations today struggle with fragmented data silos that span data centers, edge environments, and multiple clouds, leading to long delays in provisioning datasets for AI training or inference. The Data Express Service addresses these challenges by providing:
- High-speed data transfers capable of achieving speeds up to 10X faster than existing methods.
- Secure, PQC (post-quantum cryptography)-enabled VPN tunnels for data-in-motion protection.
- Enterprise-grade access controls and the ability to deploy data mover agents within customer tenants for additional security and compliance needs.
- A cloud-native delivery model on OCI, leveraging Oracle’s global infrastructure for scalability, reliability, and integration with existing enterprise AI workloads.
This combination of acceleration and security makes Riverbed’s offering well-suited for AI data lifecycle needs, ranging from aggregating training data to federating inference results across global locations.
A Strategic Partnership for AI Acceleration
The collaboration with Oracle is particularly significant. OCI provides the foundational infrastructure for the service, allowing Riverbed to deliver high-performance throughput and security assurances at scale.
“Customers are looking for faster, more secure ways to move massive datasets so they can bring AI initiatives to life,” said Sachin Menon, VP, Cloud Engineering at Oracle. “With Riverbed Data Express Service deployed on OCI, organizations will be able to accelerate time to value, reduce costs, and help ensure that their data remains protected.”
This partnership reinforces Oracle’s growing focus on becoming a critical enabler of enterprise AI ecosystems, through both infrastructure and strategic collaborations, while giving Riverbed a proven, global backbone to scale its SaaS offerings.
Momentum and Market Context
Riverbed CEO Dave Donatelli highlighted that this launch comes amid strong business performance: “In the first half of this year, we experienced strong demand in our overall business, achieving 77% year-over-year bookings growth. With our new Data Express Service announced today, and with more services planned in the future, we will continue to build on our momentum, helping customers maximize the return on their AI investment.”
That momentum aligns with findings from Riverbed’s 2025 Global AI Research Study, which surveyed 1,200 leaders and technical specialists across seven countries. The research revealed that 75% of organizations plan to formalize an AI data repository strategy, and 90% identify the movement and sharing of AI data as vital to their AI success, highlighting a clear demand for data acceleration services like Data Express.
Chalan Aras, SVP and GM of Riverbed’s Acceleration Business, emphasized this point: “Speed, security, and simplicity are now key driving factors for successful AI outcomes. We’re leveraging over two decades of large-scale data movement expertise to dramatically shrink data transfer timelines and accelerate our customer’s path to competitive advantage in the AI era.”
Why It Matters
AI’s effectiveness depends not only on model sophistication but also on data readiness, the ability to rapidly aggregate, curate, and deliver massive datasets to GPU clusters for training and inference. As enterprises evolve from pilot AI initiatives to production-scale deployments, the speed and security of data movement have become strategic differentiators.
Riverbed’s Data Express Service arrives at a pivotal moment. By integrating AI data acceleration, post-quantum security, and cloud-native scalability, Riverbed is positioning itself as a key enabler of distributed AI ecosystems, bridging the gap between where enterprise data resides and where AI innovation happens.
For Oracle, hosting the service on OCI underscores its growing role in the AI infrastructure stack, extending beyond compute to become a trusted data movement and security platform.
Ultimately, this launch reflects a broader industry shift: the convergence of observability, acceleration, and AI infrastructure into unified, intelligent services. As AI becomes foundational to enterprise competitiveness, the ability to accelerate “AI data movement” will define the next generation of digital leaders.
Availability: Riverbed Data Express Service is planned for general availability in Q4 2025.
