Orange Business Services (OBS) added Riverbed's Aternity end-user experience monitoring tool to its existing Visibility-as-a-Service (VaaS) offering. It's also offering Aternity it as a managed service within its VaaS portfolio.

Laurent Perrin, director of product marketing for application-driven networks at OBS, said the provider’s earlier VaaS offer was based on other technologies from the Riverbed SteelCentral portfolio as well as from Infovista.

Perrin explained that the addition of Aternity will bring a comprehensive view of the end-user experience, allowing the identification of the cause of a performance issue for the end-user. It also makes it possible to perform analysis on performance trends, “to proactively optimize the infrastructure, monitor the usage of new digital applications, and also help with business processes efficiency analysis. This makes the solution relevant not only for IT divisions within companies but also for different business lines,” Perrin said.

Aternity will be used to support customers as they roll out services such as SD-WAN or migrate to the cloud. OBS also pointed out that this is the first time the Aternity technology is available as a managed service offering from any global service provider.

Riverbed acquired Aternity in 2016, with the aim of expanding its SteelCentral performance monitoring platform. Prior to that it acquired SD-WAN provider Ocedo to get SteelCentral to market faster with application-defined SD-WAN.

The vendor has also worked with OBS since 2005, and provides support for multiple service offerings ranging from WAN optimization and app acceleration (Riverbed SteelHead), IT virtualization (Riverbed SteelFusion), network visibility (Riverbed SteelCentral), and SD-WAN (Riverbed SteelConnect).

For its part, OBS has been dipping its toes into SD-WAN since 2016. Earlier this year, it unveiled plans to create a “one-stop shop” for SD-WAN, according to John Isch, the director of the network and voice practice in North America for OBS. The operator currently offers its SD-WAN, which it calls Flexible SD-WAN, through both Cisco-Viptela technology and Riverbed’s SteelConnect technology.

Riverbed has also been expanding its various platforms and technologies on an ongoing basis. In 2018, for instance, it updated its SteelCentral application performance management (APM) platform to provide native visibility into containers running on Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry. It also announced that its SteelFusion IT edge technology supported Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization, and that SteelConnect was integrated with Microsoft’s Azure Virtual WAN.

CORRECTION: Story corrected to clarify Riverbed's Aternity platform as an end-user experience monitoring tool.