Riverbed has a new captain at its helm. The company announced Rich McBee had been appointed president and CEO.

The former head of business communications firm Mitel, McBee relieves interim Riverbed CEO David Murphy who took over after Jerry Kennelly retired earlier this spring after 16 years with the company.

"I’m looking forward to working with our experienced team to accelerate our execution and drive great outcomes for Riverbed as well as for our partners and customers,” McBee said in a statement.

McBee sees Riverbed as well-positioned to capitalize on the growing number of organizations in the process of modernizing their WAN deployments.

According to Riverbed Chairman David Murphy, McBee is a good fit to accelerate the company's upward momentum.

“Rich is a strong leader and strategist, and has a solid track record of driving business execution and results as well as bringing the passion and dedication to operational excellence that he is well known for in the industry,” said Murphy, in a statement.

Alongside the Riverbed CEO news, the company announced the general availability of its SteelConnect EX, which it bills as an "enterprise-class and carrier-grade" WAN edge platform.

First announced in June alongside a partnership with rival SD-WAN vendor Versa, SteelConnect EX features enhanced SD-WAN capabilities including integrated application acceleration and advanced network security services. Core to this mission is the company's SD-WAN, which is designed to interoperate with the enterprise's existing WAN infrastructure.

"Riverbed’s new SteelConnect EX encompasses the scalability, performance, and security to meet the needs of the most complex networks,” said Dante Malagrino, chief development officer at Riverbed.

With SteelConnect EX, Riverbed is positioning itself to capitalize on what it sees as "mounting pressure" on large enterprises with thousands of branch offices to modernize their WAN infrastructure and adopt software-defined networking technologies.

A recent IDC report had Riverbed ranked No. 5 in terms of revenues among SD-WAN vendors.