'Our partners are now closing purchase orders in 48 hours'- Riverbed channel chief

Bridget Bisnette says WFH boom means Riverbed's partners can make hay in two of its four technology pillars

Riverbed claims the WFH boom has dramatically cut the sales cycle for its application acceleration technology, with partners now able to close purchase orders inside 48 hours.

Talking to CRN sister publication Channel Partner Insight over Zoom, Riverbed senior vice president of global partner sales, Bridget Bisnette, said that the WFH boom has boosted the partner opportunity around two of Riverbed's four technology pillars.

Sales of its application acceleration and network performance management solutions are up "ten-fold" as customers rush to improve the performance of newly operational home workers, Bisnette claimed.

"Our sales cycle [normally] runs about three to six months; these POs are closing in 48 hours," she said.

"That's the opportunity for the partners. The partners need to stay close to the customer and understand what their pain points are. The customers have been trying to get their WFH employees operational, and now they've moved to the phase of saying ‘okay, how can I improve their performance'?

"And that dovetails right into our NPM solution, because once they get the operational and product the network team says ‘I need visibility'."

The surge in remote workers from 15 to almost 100 per cent of workers has "put a tremendous burden" on both home and work networks, with staff now competing for bandwidth with their kids, Bisnette said.

"Performance has become a huge issue given this WFH community", she said, giving the example of an oil company who'd phoned Riverbed for help in March.

"They issued a PO and deployed tens of thousands of licenses - these licenses increase the performance at a client level for the customer for things like Office365 and Salesforce. Everyone is accessing these cloud-based apps from home now and the performance is really tough for them."

Although demand for Riverbed's other two product pillars - WAN optimisation and SD-WAN - are lower, Bisnette said there is currently no need to lower sales targets for partners.

"If we start to see a significant impact to our revenue and bookings - which we haven't - we would of course be flexible with that. With the demand for the two quadrants I was discussing - and even the pull through for Steelhead [WAN optimisation] refreshes - our business is doing well," she said.

"As a category for our partners, we are one of the ones that they have to worry about less."