Riverbed expanded its application acceleration capabilities today with two cloud-based offerings designed to enhance Office 365 and software-as-a-service (SaaS) application performance. The company claims these services help enterprises achieve 10 times higher performance in Office 365.

The ongoing pandemic changed the way enterprises communicate emphasizing unified communications platforms like Microsoft Teams, explained Riverbed Chief Development Officer Dante Malagrino, in a statement.

"While these tools help companies to quickly scale and connect workforces that may be working from anywhere, in or outside the office, the value enterprises are able to achieve from these SaaS investments can be limited by the networks that connect us," he said.

To this end, Riverbed added support for Microsoft collaboration services and Office 365 to its SaaS Accelerator, which is slated for release in the third quarter of 2020.

The cloud-based service is designed to ensure consistent experiences when using services like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Box, Veeva, and now Microsoft Office 365, Teams, Stream, SharePoint, Dynamics customer relationship management, and Exchange.

Riverbed claims the service can be deployed in a matter of minutes and can reduce up to 99% of video data from corporate networks.

Alongside SaaS Accelerator, Riverbed will be launching an Office 365 specific offering called Accelerator for O365.

The service can be deployed without any hardware or endpoints and, as its name suggests, is designed to accelerate Microsoft Office 365 web apps.

According to ESG Research, Riverbed's offerings come at a time when workers have been forced to work from home using whatever connectivity was in place.

"According to ESG Research four out of 10 survey respondents struggled with subpar internet connectivity, which resulted in problems during online video meetings and when using collaboration tools," said Bob Laliberte, practice director and senior analyst at ESG, in a statement.

Earlier this year Riverbed went back to its WAN optimization roots, announcing a new strategy that centers on providing customers four “fundamental pillars,” made up of WAN optimization, application performance, network visibility, and with a caveat SD-WAN.

“We don’t do SD-WAN, we don’t do WAN optimization, and we don’t do network performance management, we do all of the above,” said Malagrino, in an earlier interview. "WAN optimization is still incredibly relevant. Despite what people say, there is still plenty of MPLS business still around.”

Up until this point, Riverbed has struggled to stand out as an SD-WAN vendor, eventually penning a deal with Versa Networks to resell its SD-WAN under the SteelConnect EX product name.