Is there a silver lining or is it all just bad ?
5 replies (most recent on top)
Turnaround? Employees are realizing more and more, especially after the SKO, that things are going downhill. There is no new development, nothing that could surprise the market. Riverbed is only milked by Thoma Bravo and when the bottle is empty, that's it. More and more employees will quit. This company is bleeding out and there is no use throwing a VP title at every duck.The channel is now being massively expanded, because it is clear that the sales department no longer sells anything. Not because the sales is incapable, but rather because the products can no longer be sold because they are overpriced and outdated. There are many other vendors with a better product especially for NPM. The channel should make up for it with more channel partners. Also therefore more channel people, because the company gets no more sales people in the market. SKO has shown me that there will be nothing new. I'm looking for a new job, I'm fed up.
I don’t think there’s a chance of a turnaround. Based on SKO and roadmaps, there isn’t anything there that will move the needle. The NPM products and all its technical baggage is the problem. Next we’d have to re-build every from scratch since it’s not architected well from a cloud optimization or hardware box scaling perspective.
Turning things around means starting over in a market full of active competition with superior technology. Like most have said before, riverbed just needs to make money to pay for its bills while throwing titles at people so they stay.
Any turnaround here would be 360 degrees not 180..............
Riverbed is 3-4 years behind in development. Riverbed doesn't matter to us. SD-WAN is the hype. The Versa OEM thing does not work. Versa themselves is doing it much better here and the acceptance in the market is much higher. I never understood why Riverbed spent so much power in SD-WAN after they discontinued the old solution, which was good by the way. We also worked with that and our customers liked it. Riverbed did a big mistake here. All SD-WAN vendors filled this gap immediately and Riverbed has no chance to compete here with the VERSA OEM solution. Why? The reason is more lack of trust. Why we should invest in a vendor our ressources that is fickle in its product strategy? Just to remember further desasters with Xirrus, Aternity. Regardind SD-WAN, who will prevail in the end is open. The fact is that SD-WAN needs visibility. Many SD-WAN vendors we work with do not have this functionality as NPM does. NPM as a silo is ok, but does not cover what the market demands at the moment. Visibility for SD-WAN is important, this would be an important gap that Riverbed could cover, but I fear that Riverbed will sleep on this need as well. As far as I know Riverbed has nothing to offer in this segment. My peers told me that this was discussed at the Riverbed Sales Kick-off and that there are plans in this direction. It just needs to come quickly, because visibility in the SD-WAN space is needed now. I hope that Riverbed reacts quickly here. The market competitors see the weakness of Riverbed here and are already working on solutions to improve the visibility in their solutions. If Riverbed reacts quickly and can offer solutions for Cisco, Juniper and Siverpeak, I see Riverbed back in the game and then Riverbed will be interesting for us again. Otherwise, we see a bleak future for Riverbed. The best solution would be for Riverbed to be sold or splitted and sold to an SD-WAN vendor, HP should buy Riverbed, because NPM for Silverpeak would be a very good solution that we would welcome, this would also mean a blatant push forward for Silverpeak and Silverpeak could use this to gain the first place in the SD-WAN community. My 2 cents and I believe I am not alone with my opinion.
Hamster