Anyone seen the new guy for Acceleration? Does he come into HQ? Is he the miracle for our woes or just the next dude to wipe out more value? Curious to see if I should speed up my exit
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The only way that I can see Steelhead (or whats left of it) being in any way useful moving forward is to rip it up into components and either sell or license it to other vendors to embed into their products. As a standalone product, this ship sailed years ago.
Riverbed dying? GTFO!
There's only so much that can be done with a product which solves a problem that is rapidly becoming a non-issue. With the move of internal applications to the cloud, and decentralizing the path to the Internet with technologies like zScaler, there are very limited circumstances where Steelhead provides benefit, like remote sites over high latency satellite links.
Steelhead has been on a decline for years and the rate of decline increases every year. Whoever is in charge will at best slow the rate of decline. At worst they will accelerate it.
I suspect a good percentage of renewals are for companies and agencies who are just blindly renewing their bills. They probably haven't re-validated if Steelhead actually adds benefit anymore.
And the various steelhead mobile / zak offerings are ill conceived, not offering the solution as a true SaaS, and not providing a solution for companies who have standardized on zScaler etc.
So my recommendation is quit while your behind. It's not going to get any better for steelhead, even in the slim chance it gets better for Riverbed as a whole.
Don't rest on your laurels, be speedy.