CHANNEL OUTLOOK 2018
During 2017, Riverbed actioned clearly defined strategic objectives which included realigning and doubling down on sales efforts, further strengthening ties with distributors, and enablement of the channel. This allowed the vendor to extend conversations with existing clients through cross-selling across their portfolio as well as making inroads into new geographies and market verticals. Riverbed has been successful in penetrating industry verticals including government, defence, finance, oil & gas and recently, the retail sector.
Scorecard
Two years ago, Riverbed began to engage with customers to help them understand that optimising their applications and troubleshooting performance in complex hybrid IT environments requires visibility not only into the network, but also into the application layer and even end-user experience. This was a new approach and required investing time and resources into educating the market. Riverbed has begun to reap the rewards of those efforts with Riverbed SteelCentral portfolio a fundamental pillar of its business in the region.
Learning from this, Riverbed has begun to conduct similar awareness programmes around SD-WAN and its SteelConnect solution. As per Riverbed’s global survey, 93% of businesses intend to implement this technology within the next four years. As a true provider of SD-WAN, this represents a significant opportunity for Riverbed, so long as Riverbed lays the necessary groundwork now.
Opportunity
Riverbed is extremely positive going into 2018. Today, businesses run on applications, and the vendor’s ability to address the performance, visibility, and control of applications, whether they are based on-premises or in the cloud, makes it relevant to all market segments.
Every enterprise is a potential customer for Riverbed and Riverbed will penetrate new accounts by first addressing their pressing need for end-to-end visibility with SteelCentral. Once Riverbed has demonstrated its ability to solve some of the greatest IT challenges organisations face, Riverbed can showcase the value of the other products in its portfolio, which are designed to tightly integrate into a holistic platform for application performance.