Riverbed Revamps Network Performance Management To Help Enterprises Combat Rampant AI Data Growth

The Network Performance Management relaunch is the latest in a series of sweeping refreshes Riverbed is making to its two core businesses: observability and acceleration.

In its latest series of sweeping revitalizations to its portfolio, Riverbed is relaunching the Network Performance Management portion of its observability suite.

The new “faster, smaller and more energy-efficient” Riverbed xx90 appliance series includes AppResponse, NetProfiler and Flow Gateway technology that will help to enhance network visibility for enterprise IT teams at a time in which intelligent observability is required thanks to significant AI-related data growth across enterprise networks, the company’s top executives told CRN.

The company is also introducing a Network Observability Essentials bundle and a flexible license option as part of its Network Performance Management (NPM) update to simplify buying and deployment for partners and enterprises.

The latest Riverbed xx90 is up to three times faster than its predecessor product, said Dave Donatelli, CEO of Riverbed.

“[Users] will get great speed and great scale, and they need both because more information is traversing over networks every single year and AI has only accelerated that trend,” he said.

The new Network Observability Essentials bundle is now available with purchase of either AppResponse packet capture and analysis or NetProfiler enterprise-scale hybrid flow monitoring. The bundle includes automation tools for IT professionals, including Riverbed IQ Essentials, the company’s SaaS-based AI offering that can identify issues and speed up resolution, with no extra infrastructure needed. Also included are role-based dashboards to provide contextual visibility for every IT team and a plug-in for the open source Grafana observability platform.

“Now it’s just one price, one package, where you can take a lot of different features that used to have to [be bought] individually,” Donatelli said. “The bundle makes it easier for [partners] to execute on a managed service because all the things they need are in the bundle.”

The automation toolset that’s part of the bundle lets partner customize how problems are solved or how to automate certain features and functions for their customers, said Richard Tworek, Riverbed’s CTO.

“It’s really built for a partner to tweak and build their own,” Tworek said.

The Essentials Bundle is available with the Riverbed Flex Subscription licensing, the company said.

Riverbed Observability Refresh

The NPM announcement is the latest of three refreshes Riverbed has made to its two core businesses: observability and acceleration.

The company in April revealed its flagship AI-powered observability platform had been expanded to include generative, predictive and agentic AI features, as well as a new module for measuring unified communications performance and an expanded packet capture feature. In May, Riverbed relaunched its network acceleration portfolio with the addition of seven new hardware and software Riverbed SteelHead offerings powered by RiOS 10, the company’s next-generation acceleration software engine.

At the same time as the network acceleration relaunch, Riverbed unveiled a flexible subscription model to make it easier and less costly for enterprises transforming their network infrastructure for the AI era, the company told CRN. Riverbed’s network observability offerings can now be consumed through the company’s Flex Subscription licensing option, which will let IT teams deploy Riverbed licenses anywhere on the network, including hardware, virtual or cloud instances, without additional software costs, the company said.

“With flexible licensing, you can actually separate the appliance from the software because we all know the magic is in the software. And you can take that license, subscribe to it like SaaS, and then run it wherever you want. We find that customers like that flexibility because they’re always changing. One day they want to run a data center, the next day they want to run it in the cloud. It’s really hard for them to plan going forward, so we kind of take the risk out of having to pick one or the other,” Donatelli said.

Riverbed’s observability bookings grew 92 percent year over year, which Donatelli said was driven by the company’s innovative products.