Riverbed, often thought of as an SD-WAN or networking vendor, is going back to its WAN optimization roots with a new strategy focusing on helping customers solve their application and performance challenges.

The company’s new strategy 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 Dante Malagrino, chief development officer at Riverbed.

Malagrino explained that while these functions make up Riverbed’s overall offering, they are simply the pieces to a larger customer performance puzzle.

WAN optimization is at the core of this strategy, it has been the company’s bread and butter almost from the beginning.

“WAN optimization is still incredibly relevant,” Malagrino claims. “Despite what people say, there is still plenty of MPLS business still around.”

However, this isn’t your run of the mill WAN optimization, he said, noting "the technology has evolved.”

And this bleeds into the closely related second pillar of the company’s new strategy: application performance.

“[WAN optimization] doesn’t only reduce bandwidth consumption, but it actually accelerates the performance of applications, applications that could sit in the data center, that can sit in the cloud, that can be delivered as [software-as-a-service],” Malagrino said.

But this changing application landscape introduces another problem, one that the third pillar of Riverbed’s strategy – network performance management, or to put it simply visibility – attempts to solve.

Malagrino said visibility is where many of Riverbed’s customers start their journey. “The first thing they want to know is what’s going on,” he explained. “If you don't know where your performance bottlenecks are, if you don't know where your problem or critical security vulnerability in the networks are, how are you going to be able to address the problem, and how will you and come up with the right solution?”

Riverbed’s fourth and final pillar is complicated. While Riverbed sees SD-WAN as a key piece of the puzzle, “we don’t think of ourselves as an SD-WAN company,” Malagrino said.

And there’s a good reason for this as Riverbed doesn’t really have an SD-WAN platform, at least not one of its own. Last October, Riverbed launched its SteelConnect EX SD-WAN offering, but that offering was based on Versa’s Secure SD-WAN technology.

It’s a decision that saw Gartner downgrade Riverbed from challenger to niche player in the research firm’s latest Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure report. Gartner noted that Riverbed is the only SD-WAN vendor in the report that is sourcing its core SD-WAN functionality from a competing vendor, something it considers a risk.

Despite this concession, Malagrino still says SD-WAN is still an important part of the company’s overall strategy.

“For us, SD-WAN is important because we see a lot of customers looking at the opportunity to combine SD-WAN with WAN optimization,” he said.

That said, Malagrino says there continues to be a misunderstanding within the industry that SD-WAN is a replacement for WAN optimization.

“SD-WAN isn’t an alternative to WAN optimization. SD-WAN is effectively next-generation routing,” he said. “The problem is that everyone thought that with software-defined WAN, with SD-WAN, you could throw away WAN optimization.”

Malagrino explained that several customers when their WAN optimization contracts came due opted for SD-WAN believing they were going to have “so much bandwidth and cheap bandwidth available on the internet that there was no need for WAN optimization anymore.”

Those customers, he said, quickly discovered their SD-WAN solution didn’t address their application performance challenges.

“They weren’t taking into account that SD-WAN is not going to solve for latency,” he said. “Bandwidth is something you can buy, latency is god-given. ... WAN optimization is not only about bandwidth reduction, it’s also about addressing the latency limitations that impact the application performance."

Riverbed's new strategy comes in the wake of a tumultuous couple of years for the vendor that have been fraught with ever-changing management and visions of the company’s path forward.

“We have been through quite a few changes over the last couple of years,” Malagrino admits.

In 2014, the company was taken private by a private equity firm Thoma Bravo and Canadian pension group Teachers’ Private Capital. Following that transition, Malagrino said the company struggled to figure out what the next big thing was going to be.

“In this look for the next big thing, I think one of the things that we missed was the obvious: that the next big thing was simply the evolution of the good old thing,” he said.

More recently, the company has seen a rapid change in leadership after Riverbed co-founder and CEO Jerry Kennelly retired in 2018, following 16 years of leadership. He handed the reigns over to then chief sales officer Paul Mountford.

Mountford served as CEO until October 2019, when he left the company — later joining PureStorage as COO — and was briefly replaced by interim CEO David Murphy.

Murphy would hold the position less than a month before Riverbed had appointed its current President and CEO Rich McBee.