Riverbed's original CTO and Product guru Steve is long gone. With him went the team of Apurva Dave who made the transition of Zeus to Stingray happen. Jerry loves fishing. All his products had to be named after a fish or al least after something related to water. So Zeus became Stingray. Dave's team left Riverbed, followed Steve to JUT. Riverbed did not know what to do with Stingray any more. They sold Stingray to Brocade. OPNET's chief architect is gone along with key members of his team. Cisco came out iWAN last year in partnership with Akamai. Cisco iWAN and Silverpeak are now both on Gartner's leader's quadrant. Reportedly Riverbed's WAN op channel partners are already testing to certify Cisco's iWAN. Riverbed's customers and partners are losing confidence as they should. Riverbed has lost two key people and associated teams for its two key products: Steelhead and OPNET. Riverbed dumped $1 billion when it bought OPNET. Thoma Bravo just dumped $3.5 billion.
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Thoma Bravo got a great deal! They only put in 2B$ and got 1.5B$ in loan which RVBD is responsible to pay for using their cash flow, not Thoma Bravo. However, if company's value goes up, only Thoma Bravo stands to gain. Thoma Bravo is here to make some money, that is for sure, only question is, is it going to make money enriching(financially) its employees or not.
Not Pradeep. PS
1 to 10 leverage deal downside for Bravo is 340,000,000 bond holders have more to lose....
Um wrong. Pradeep was not the OPNET chief architect. He was leading OPNET's legacy product Modeler.
The next step is the when the remaining employees leave in droves after they get their RSUs. Then Thoma Bravo would own a bunch of products they can't sell, improve, maintain or support. And then what's left of Riverbed gets folded into dynaTrace... creating a new, different mess.