I was part of new product(Service delivery platform) that Riverbed was developing.
Whole product was sc-apped one month back .
30 engineers from India and near about similar number from US and UK were fired.
Horrible management. Provided only one month severance package.
Would not recommend anyone to join this company.
I agree with you.
It was just sad that some engineers had no option than to return to their previous employers like Cisco and Extreme Networks. Must have been "humiliating" to go back after you left for greener pastures.
I don't understand why companies keep hiring these failed VPs, SVPs, directors and project managers who don't have drive and guts to finish what they started. They used their privilege position to leave the sinking ship.
Agreed, Riverbed PM’s aren’t really good at Riverbed (including Opnet and Mazu). The reasons are endless but the one that sticks out are the TAM chasers. I think bad PM’s google “what do PM’s do” and one of the topics they’ll read is addressable market and so they shove features into products in order to compete in that market. Sadly, again, with bad PM’s not really knowing how to be real PM’s, the field teams suffers due to a complete lack of GTM strategy.
Riverbed hiring and promotion practices, includes PM sadly.
let’s not also forget OPNET and Mazu financial drag on riverbed since acquisition. From a finance standpoint, I’d say they were a parasite feeing off the SH team for years which may explain why SDP had a shorter than expected lifecycle
Product management was awful leading to a lost opportunity because there was already a major customer but management had unclear vision and could not deliver a product in an agile fashion to the customer for rapid iteration. As someone mention, Riverbed does not have time to wait 5 years for a product to mature internally and then release. They should have released a minimum viable product sooner by being more focused.
The end-of-year 2017 SKO was a fiasco, rather than showing that SDP could bootstrap in minutes plain x86 platforms located at various remote branch offices into an environment where steel connect, steel head and other Riverbed products can be orchestrated. They showed a face recognition demo that left the sales force confused on what is the value add they will sell. The main value was supposed to be: "Riverbed will take care of orchestrating any set of Riverbed products and third parties products at SCALE for you and you just need a x86 server". This is very attractive to service providers with large installation base and big enterprise too. Riverbed would ship software rather than hardware and could sell more products as customers could license the products on live demand.
The engineering team was left to make a lot of decisions which worked well technically but might not be what the main customer wanted right now. It was not the fault of the engineers who gave more than their dued efforts to try to make the product a success.
A lot of the senior management jumped ship to other companies as they realize that the product was not gaining traction at consumer events and the lower engineers were left on a sinking ship. It was a disgraceful behaviour similar to captains leaving passengers on a sinking ship. I sat at one of the demo in MWC and it just did not make sense the way the demo was run.
All in all, bad product management lead to wasted resources for a struggling company and putting the engineers in a difficult financial position after the project was sc-apped.
No one outside that group knew what this service deliver platform was - even today no one knows that it was for other than it was a product for service providers. Given the runway for this team, I don’t think they sold this product at all and the technology itself was probably not what Service Providers wanted or probably didn’t integrate well into their ecosystem. I suspect this platform was some open daylight system of sorts and should’ve been best left to an acquisition to run it - like Brocade’s ODP. I think at times Riverbed is too generous (or unwise) allowing a group of non-product folks create products. Riverbed is even generous handing out CTO titles to folks who have not invented anything, written core software or even designed asic’s and, so, in many ways, this product was doomed to fail and probably was eating into the bottom line.
What was the reason for their layoff? Were there team performance issues involved? What was the credibility of the platform team?
Was there a strategic planing involved?
To the person that got 1month severance.
How long were you employed at Riverbed? During previous layoffs they handed out 1 month per year of service.
If they only gave 1 month to everybody I will need to take some action (job hunt) immediately.
Didn't mean to be rude. What else did you expect !
No customers. In turn, no profits.
Why was the product sc-apped ? No profits/customers ?