Riverbed tops Gartner's WAN optimisation Magic Quadrant

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 01 February 2012 15:37

Gartner has positioned Riverbed Technologies well ahead of competition in its latest Magic Quadrant for wide area network optimisation vendors.

Silver Peak Systems and Blue Coat systems shared the leaders' quadrant in a sparsely populated MQ:  the only other vendors rated were Cisco (challengers), Citrix and Ipanema Technologies (visionaries) and Circadence and F5 Networks (niche players).

Gartner said it had dropped Juniper Networks "because it no longer meets the revenue threshold" and had considered for inclusion Certeon, Exinda and Streamcore, but none had met the revenue criteria.

Riverbed, said Gartner: "Offers the broadest set of capabilities in the industry, including features for large branch networks, data centre replication and storage networking applications, and single remote users, combined with unmatched ease of installation and management and best-in-class presales and post sales support."

It added: "Despite its size and success, Riverbed remains one of the most innovative companies in this market: the acquisition of Aptimize and Zeus, the new partnership with Akamai (to develop a SaaS acceleration solution) and EMC (resale agreement), the pending introduction of Virtual Edge, and other features and capabilities demonstrate this."

However it cautioned that: "The product has lagged in some areas, particularly application SLAs, visibility and video delivery. Riverbed still doesn't offer UDP optimisation, which was planned in the first half of 2011 but was delayed until December 2011. [And] its discounting policies can be inconsistent on large deals, sometimes resulting in high prices, compared with other WOC vendors."

Riverbed, Silver Peak and Blue Coat all issued press releases trumpeting their inclusion in the leaders' quadrant. Silver Peak claimed that the market had been reduced to a two horse race between it and Riverbed.

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