The long and winding path that networking vendor Riverbed has been on over the past two decades took another turn last week.

On May 30, private equity firm Vector Capital announced that it was acquiring Riverbed. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed.  According to a Bloomberg report, the deal is estimated to be worth approximately $450 million.

The new ownership is just the latest step in the saga of Riverbed's ownership as the company has bounced around the tides of market conditions across its two decades of existence.

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Riverbed was founded in 2002 and initially had a primary focus on WAN acceleration and expanded in the following years into application performance management (APM) and even SD-WAN. The company went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 2006 where it remained for eighy years until the company was taken private in a $3.6 billion deal led by private equity firm Thoma Bravo. In 2021, Riverbed entered into chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, as the company struggled with a large debt load. It was able to exit bankruptcy protection the same year, thanks to new backing from Apollo Global Management, which took over as the majority owners of Riverbed from Thoma Bravo.

Riverbed's entry, exit into SD-WAN and its observability today

Sitting at the foundation of Riverbed's product portfolio is the company's SteelHead hardware appliance. SteelHead is a WAN optimization technology that helps to optimize network traffic delivery, improving overall bandwidth and application performance.

Riverbed has also attempted in various ways to enter the SD-WAN space. In 2016, Riverbed debuted its SteelConnect SD-WAN product. In 2017 Riverbed acquired Wi-Fi vendor Xirrus to “supercharge” its SD-WAN efforts, though that didn't quite pan out. Two short years later, Riverbed penned a deal with Versa Networks to sell that company's SD-WAN technology. By 2020, Riverbed executives were telling SDxCentral the company was going to 'double down' on WAN acceleration.

On a somewhat parallel track over the last decade, Riverbed has steadily expanded its capability for user experience and observability. In 2016, Riverbed acquired application performance management vendor Aternity and has expanded the portfolio significantly in recent years. In 2022, Riverbed announced its Alluvio portfolio for unified observability.

Riverbed remains a strong player in a couple of different markets

Despite its financial challenges, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of research for network infrastructure and operations at analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), still sees Riverbed as a strong player in a few areas.

First off, McGillicuddy noted that the Riverbed WAN optimization business remains a market leader for the large number of enterprises that continue to use MPLS networks. He added that  Riverbed has been adapting this technology to apply to more modern aspects of digital infrastructure under the umbrella term - Acceleration.

"It’s [Riverbed] adding acceleration solutions that target things like Office 365 and other SaaS services," McGillicuddy told SDxCentral.

While Riverbed had aspirations in the SD-WAN space, in McGillicuddy's view the company did not end up with the results that it hoped for there. Finally, he sees the Riverbed Alluvio business as offering market leading products in monitoring and observability.

"Riverbed has made news over the last year for having some financial restructuring to address its debt, relying on bankruptcy protection to execute on it," McGillicuddy said. "That may have worried some customers."

While no customer ever wants to see a vendor announce something that involves bankruptcy protection, McGillicuddy  emphasized that from what he has seen the company has continued to invest in product development and go-to-market throughout.

"The private equity firm that acquired Riverbed appears to be a specialist in targeting mature, mid-sized tech companies," he said. "It’s the type of private equity that reinvests in its acquisitions and builds them up, rather than stripping them down and maximizing short-term profit."