Riverbed brings in ex-EMC director to shake up channel strategy

Optimisation vendor wants to educate partners on the products it sells so it can be more relevant to their businesses

Riverbed is looking to be more relevant to its partners under its new channel sales director for the UK and Ireland, Mark Hiley.

Before joining Riverbed, Hiley (pictured) was director of EMEA sales at EMC for over two years, and UK channel sales director at Dell before that.

Riverbed was founded in 2002 as a WAN-optimisation vendor, before expanding into software optimisation, including hybrid networking, cloud and SaaS.

The San Francisco-based vendor's most well-known product is the SteelHead WAN-optimisation solution. Hiley said that a big part of his new role is to educate partners about the other products Riverbed does and make the vendor more relevant to its channel.

"One thing I learned very quickly is that we have an enormous amount of partners but they have been built and done business with Riverbed on some of the older products. Things such as SteelHead, which has done immensely well in the market and continues to do so," he said.

"But they don't realise that through acquisitions and product developments, Riverbed has a large number of other product portfolios that people don't know about and don't sell. We are not just Steelhead. We really want those partners educated so they can get on board with our other offerings."

Riverbed does over 90 per cent of its business through the channel, and goes to market through its distributors Arrow, Zycko and Avnet.

Hiley added that its distribution partners will be key to its plan to educate its resellers about the other solutions it offers.

"Riverbed has a large number of other product portfolios that people don't know about and don't sell."

"We rely quite heavily on our distribution partners to help provide training services and enablement services," he said. "They are already doing courses and training days for us. I am going to grow our team, which will be tasked with educating and enabling partners and bringing new partners on board."

Hiley said the lack of relevance with its channel partners was because not enough employees were focused on channel development at the vendor.

"A lot of it has been down to there not being enough people focused on channel development within Riverbed. It has been without any real channel team for the last nine months, so I am effectively coming into an empty space," he explained.

"Ultimately, the objective is to have more relevant and committed partners. We have a lot of partners right now but they haven't been managed. The opportunity is there to expand the partnerships that already exist, but also bring on new partners."

VAR ComTech System has been a Riverbed partner for around two years, and its director Richard Sutton said he has already noticed more education coming through from its distributor Zycko around Riverbed's technology.

"We've found [Riverbed] to be very useful in terms of being proactive with us and helping us, as we are still reasonably small in terms of the size of our organisation, although the client base is quite large," he said.

"The support they have given us alongside distribution has been really good. We specialise in application performance management with Riverbed, but they are more wholly known for doing WAN optimisation. [Zycko] have been very good at being a flagship for Riverbed and educating partners."