It’s going to be interesting to see what happens to Riverbed, whether it remains a public company, or it is acquired in a leveraged buy-out by a private equity firm. Regardless, Riverbed remains on the path to innovation, and it’s work as usual for them.
Riverbed is a hardware and software company, whose products are used by cloud companies. It’s Steelhead (WAN Optimization) and Stingray (Application Delivery) are products, not a service like CDN or WAN Optimization-as-a-Service. This begs the question. Why doesn’t Riverbed develop a proof-of-concept WAN Optimization-as-a-Service similar to Aryaka.
The first order of business is to roll out infrastructure across 5 US locations (SJ, LA, Ashburn, Dallas & Seattle). That should be enough to cover west coast, east coast, and everything in between. The infrastructure would consist of 2 cabinets per location, 5-7 servers per location, router, Internet bandwidth from a Tier 1 carrier, and Riverbed hardware & software. If CDN caching software and web control panel is needed, the source code can be purchased or licensed inexpensively.
Integration will be a pain, but there are many incredibly talented engineers in the bay area or LA that could make this happen. Specialized hardware is thing of the past. Sooner or later, Riverbed is going to need to move into cloud services to thrive and grow its business.