Riverbed banks on application performance infrastructure

Vendor deepens its reach into sector that is more than 10 times the size of its current core market

WAN optimisation vendor Riverbed is embarking on an ambitious plan to conquer the application performance infrastructure market and potentially increase its customer base tenfold.

The firm recently completed a four-year plan to transform from a single-product company, and is confident it now has the products in place to address a sector more than 10 times the size of its current core market.

Jerry Kennelly, chief executive of Riverbed, said: "We started Riverbed 11 years ago to eliminate distance and location as variables in delivering applications by solving the problems of latency and bandwidth limitations in wide area networks.

"We are proud of our heritage in pioneering the WAN optimisation market and we believe that Steelhead has an important and bright future. But Riverbed today is much more than WAN optimisation.

"Over the past four years, we have made the journey from a single product to four major product sets that add up to something much bigger – the industry's most complete application performance platform to enable a concept we call location-independent computing," he added.

"We made the investment. We did the work. We have the products. Now it's time to capitalise."