Since its inception in 2002, the San Francisco-based Riverbed, with its Middle East office in Dubai, has helped the world’s largest organisations maximise the performance of their networks and applications so they can reach the full potential of their IT investments.
The Riverbed Network and Application Performance Platform enables organisations to visualise, optimise, accelerate and remediate the performance of any network for any application. The company addresses performance and visibility holistically with best-in-class WAN optimisation, network performance management, application acceleration and enterprise-grade SD-WAN.
Riverbed is participating at the GITEX Technology Week and ITP.net caught up with Mena Migally, Regional Vice President, META, to find out about the company’s plans…
What is different in Riverbed’s participation in GITEX this year?
This year is especially exciting for Riverbed as we have big announcements regarding the expansion and augmentation of our solution portfolio. This will translate to new and enhanced capabilities in end-to-end visibility and application acceleration solutions for our customers. It also means more, innovative use cases that our channel partners can deliver through the Riverbed portfolio.
Our presence at GITEX will give us the opportunity to unveil these major updates and educate our customers, partners, and prospects on the benefits they can realise as a result.
We are co-sponsoring the presence of our regional distributors – Mindware and StarLink – and Riverbed will have kiosks at each of their stands. Through this, we aim to demonstrate our firm commitment to our channel partners. Our intention is to educate technically proficient resellers and integrators about how they can leverage the full scope of the Riverbed product portfolio to deliver comprehensive IT solutions for the needs of the modern enterprise.
Which technologies should organisations focus on to remain competitive?
Adoption of cloud has accelerated in the region in recent years and today, the majority of organisations have embraced the hybrid model. While there are clear benefits to this approach, IT teams must address the challenges it potentially raises. The sprawling nature of the hybrid infrastructure means IT teams are left with a complete lack of visibility into their network performance and employee activity. Subsequently, they are now faced with a vast increase in performance issues.
According to a research study from Riverbed, weaker employee productivity (37%), increased anxiety (36%), lack of work motivation (34%) and difficulty engaging with customers (34%) are all impacts of poor visibility across hybrid networks. Therefore, it’s essential for leaders to invest in the right network performance management solutions which provide a comprehensive overview of all the activity on the network so that issues can be identified and resolved quickly.
This means embracing technology that not only collects information from every device connected, but also analyses and produces insights from the data across all user applications. With this insight, businesses are in a better position to respond to slow running applications or troubleshoot any network inefficiencies employees may be experiencing.
In addition to the right network performance management technologies, businesses must also implement application acceleration tools to mitigate the impact of latency and bandwidth related network issues. Used in conjunction with increased visibility of the network, these tools allow organisations to optimise application performance, drive employee productivity and ultimately ensure the long-term success of business operations.
How is Riverbed enabling regional organisations to embrace a bold digital future?
Our theme for GITEX this year is enabling ‘Visibility, Security and Performance for the Modern, Hybrid Enterprise’ as we look to inform attendees about how they can capitalise on new opportunities, address vulnerabilities, and fundamentally rethink how their organisations and employees can thrive in a world that’s digital-first, and hybrid by design. This aligns with the theme of our flagship Global User Conference which was held just prior to GITEX on 6 October.
What does GITEX mean to Riverbed and why is it important despite the ongoing pandemic?
Riverbed sees GITEX as one of the main trade shows in our regional events calendar, and we have maintained a regular presence at the show.
Top executives from our regional leadership, sales, and pre-sales teams will be attending GITEX. Attendees can meet them at the dedicated Riverbed kiosks on the stands of our distributors, Mindware (E1 in Hall 3) and StarLink (C1 in Hall 1).
GITEX is important because there is no doubt that in-person meetings and interpersonal engagement have been sorely missed. The Middle East remains a highly relationship-oriented market and while virtual meetings have done well to ensure business continuity, they aren’t a feasible substitute for in-person interactions.
Therefore, GITEX will give us the opportunity to meet a large number of key industry stakeholders in one location – something that has been virtually impossible over the last 18 months.
