Thread regarding Riverbed Technology Inc. layoffs

Very few Company would be interested in buying a multi bilion dollar company with 20 different sub standard products. We still have good customer base but that's not something MS or Amazon would ever need.

there going to be a bidding war, everyone needs WanOp nowadays

Lol, Amazon and MS !!! nice try. Keep Dreaming.

Riverbed will be sold by end of the year to Microsoft or Amazon! It is a simple lowering of COGS to get end customer to the cloud faster using the good ole WAN OPT. The rest will be sold off or the technologies will be put in a desk drawer with no investment. It is not an IPO and when costs cutting is number 1 priority that means buyout! The Amazon play is another example of how Jeff Bezos wants to force change or jump the S-Curve and force carriers to build out wireless network faster or adopt satellite TLPS quicker so that his AWS adoption continues its 49percent growth! Might want to look at Mr. Elders back ground at Intel and the MO of TB. Silver Peak is crushing the Emea market right now and will this SDwan ever work?

That's the issue: would you buy this stock if it went public, even at 9 cents? It's probably a sell at 5. Sad but not every company succeeds.

Q3 is looking tough because they pulled forward a lot of the usual Q3 Federal business into Q2(See Andy Elders slide that breaks down sales regions and Federal was up 167% YOY).

Mountford did some more mumbling about Riverbed bond price. The average employee could care less about the bond prices. Every quarter there is some reason that there is no improvement. Subscription sales accounting is the reason for the last two quarters. In fact Mountford already put forward the excuse for next quarter which is high sales commissions.

Now he is talking about $400M Ebitda by 2020. I looked back at the TB presentation when they took us over and they expected $400M of EBITDA in 2015. What a POS this company is with no growth and an unsatisfactory CEO.

your stock probably is worth less than 9 cent per share now. i can tell he lacks the confidence when he mentioned Q3.

Listening to Mountford was depressing during the Q4 All hands. This company is way underperforming the initial TB expectations and has not increased revenue nor EBITDA in 4 years.

Good note about valuation. Works well for everyone except someone who wants to leave the company. If you leave you don't receive current fair market value for the options. Seems crooked to me.

Awww too bad it wasnt Riverbed that Broadcom bought instead of CA

My understanding is that the stock value won't go up until new investment comes in and at that time, the company will gets re-valuated to a reasonable price so the new investor gets its fair share of stocks.

If there is no new investors, price can stay at 9cent/share forever until liquidation event happens.

There hasn't been new venture capital since 2016. Jan according to Couchbase, so it probably means that Company's valuation hasn't 'officially' changed since then, i.e. 9 cents per share.

The real valuation probably has changed quite a lot(which would be reflected in the next valuation), rough estimate of value = ebitda * multiples. though the company hasn't increased ebidta, the multiples have changed because U.S. economy has been increasing since 2015. The closer we are to a software company the more multiples we will have. And i think RVBD currently easily worth 4.5b(15x) to 6b(20x) USD(with SteelCentral worth 2B and the rest worth 4B).

stay calm and wait for next valuation!

Thanks for the reality check. You are right that one shouldn't think that this company is going to do something positive for their employees like create stock option value, allow people to cash out, give more stock options , or raise pay.

Riverbed issued bonds initially when it went private. Those bonds trade on a private market (institutional investors) and are not available to public. I am guessing he made a presentation to these investors to not dump rvbd bonds.

So don’t get your hopes high. It’s a regular creditor-debtor churn.

Q2 2017 comparables were low so Q2 2018 had nowhere to go but up.

Saw Mountford's June video update and he said he was in New York and met with debt holders and investors. He then mumbled something about Riverbeds bond price increase like it was a good thing,

Hopefully the stock option value increased also because .09 is a joke.

Maybe he met with someone that that wants to aquire Riverbed away from TB.

q2 numbers look good, better than expectations.. maybe things are on the upswing.

3 months now since Jerry left. If there was a deal to sell it should have come to fruition by now. I guess it will be another year now before something happens.

Solarwinds fill paperwork to go public.

Hey JK, look what you did to us.

Two years ago I heard that was the price then. We have made no progress in two years? I calculated that at 7.2B in 2019 it would be 9.00. we will never get 7.2B though but that was their lie. I should have quit a long time ago and invested my money in the Nasdaq.

What a bunch of crooks TB are

Most recent price for vested class B shares is 9cents [unvested shares are bought back at theoriginal price]

It doesn't look like anyone is interested in any integration. Since April emphasis is to cut any expense if they are not sales org related.

Call me crazy but wouldnt a combination of Riverbed, Dynatrace, and Solarwinds all owned by Thoma Bravo make a fantastic merged company with great products?

Riverbed's NetIM and AppInternals are not exactly the market leaders where they overlap with SolarWinds and Dynatrace products. Just think of the economies of scale this would bring(ie. layoffs).

I know it is probably difficult for Thoma Bravo to make this happen but the combined company would be ~$3.5B in annual sales and a market cap of $15B.

RVBD IPO is a "Fugazi" for RVBD employees and will be for next several years or longer....If you wait for IPO, it's time to move on.

They cant take this company IPO because the revenue and earnings is inconsistent. Maybe after some of the revenue recognition rules for subscriptions changes next year it will smooth out. But transitioning to subscription licensing makes the revenue/earnings look wacky and the stock would get slaughtered in the public markets. The only hope we have for a financial transaction in the next two years is a buyout from another PE firm or technology company. Maybe Thoma Bravo told Jerry this was the case and he left because of it.

Watching Mountford’s deflection of the “are we going to ipo?” was disheartening. “Don’t keep looking out the windows”. For the love of Pete, we’ve been holding on for IPO as the great white hope. Kill off the hope and you’re going to push people to take the leap.. or maybe that is the plan - increase natural attrition rates so you don’t have to pay the RIF costs.

It will be interesting to see how long the Support organisation takes to move more of the Tac to India now that the India Tac is a month away from going live. Regardless of the dialogue in the q2, definitely sounds like there’s a plan to cost cut towards profitability

What's with all the bigwigs leaving Kennelly and Harris and the internal promotions to CEO/CSO?

come on guys. NASDAQ is 30% increase YOY while we are back at 2015 level. we are far far away from average. What makes you guys stay in this company?

Has anyone left the company recently and can tell us the value they paid on the Class B stock?

After the Q2 company meeting it seems our EBITDA is back to 2015 levels. I have almost given up on this company ever making strides forward much less getting a decent buyout offer.

Opnet was a publicly traded company when Riverbed bought it. Any falsification of financials would be an SEC violation. If that is the reason you believe I don’t think that sounds accurate at all (Because if it was an SEC violation, RVBD could have recovered part of their acquisition costs). However it is possible that there was ‘miscommunication’ on the sales/revenue synergy post acquisition - but come on, can you blame Opnet for that? Execs in Riverbed didn’t do their home work - They wanted to get into the APM space and sell lot of software with experience in selling only a box; Didn’t pan out perfectly, they should have had a better plan!

In general terms I heard the the sales/revenue/profit/etc. was overstated by the owners of Opnet. This led to Riverbed paying a higher acquisition price for OpNet than what the true financials warranted.

There was a reference earlier by one of the ops that Cohen brothers misguided JK. Can you elaborate how?

I heard Jerry left because he has had some health scares and decided to hang it up. At least that is the word from management. I am personally skeptical of this but he certainly deserves a break. As far Mountford goes he is not someone that I would think that you would put in front of bankers and public for an IPO. The fact that there was not an external CEO hired may have significance. But alas I can only conjecture and no one seems to have any credible rumors about near term deal.

In all seriousness wasn't his replacement a reasonably successful and respected exec at Cisco? Not that it means much, but.. guess we get to see what he can do..

Also, with the new engineering honcho joining, I find it hard to see a major transaction coming as he definitely wouldn't have joined if such a thing were forthcoming..or maybe J pulled a blind one one him like the Cohen brothers did on him in 2012..

It's a bit hard to take his replacement seriously, what with the dragged-through-the-hedge-backwards perennially scruffy appearance.

Having worked for Brocade when it was acquired by Broadcom, I have to say "be careful what you wish for". The companies will take only the tasty parts and sell off the rest, see Ruckus/Brocade/Arris and Extreme. It's not pretty, although most people kept their jobs.

the potential buyer is not a rumor. J didn't deny it nor does he like the deal. perhaps TB has to remove J so they can sell the company to the potential buyer. I really hope the buyer would be a bigger tech entity instead of another blood s---ing PE firm.

FFS we like to live in a bubble.f off naysayers

That is an April fools article. MSFT did not acquire Spotify. MSFT is not going to buy Riverbed. You are full of it.

totally makes sense, once they finish will Spotify they will do Riverbed

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/04/01/spotify-microsoft-acquisition-billions/