Riverbed should have fully supported their storage products—especially whitewater/steelstore. Instead they tolerated excuses from sales for not selling. Sales always holds tremendous power in a company, but are also short sighted since their job is to hit the current FY targets—not plan for the future.
Most of the salespeople who refused to sell the portfolio are long gone and have left the rest of us holding the bag.
What’s new? Are things improving since last time? Which exec made an a-- of him/herself?
Pe--s E. S.
Some are/were good but wasting talent
RB PM’s have no business sense, technical depth, no technical vision or all of the above. They are no better than a babysitter, doing the bare minimum to keep the product alive, dicking off and collecting checks. I figure we can’t find anyone better than the clowns we have right now so we are stuck with them.
The PM job is supposed to be a hard and very senior role at any company. So RB giving these roles to anyone that raises their hands is a bad sign of our products success.
Still a lot of PM dead weight in that team SF, SH, SC
Those 2 r gone right? I agree with your assessment. Or Are you talking about current SH/SC leaders also?
Spoken like a true PM. RB had lousy PMs across the board. I never really understood VPs of PM in the Steelhead group. Just watching those two was alarming they had no strategy and knowledge of the products or industry. They were at best mid-level managers themselves :( Too bad RB is a great company its PMs just s---
Well you can always sell the customers. So when the next SF refresh comes, instead of buying support for one more cycle these companies can position their flagship products. If it was so easy to displace SF they would have done it already. SF rev is still nothing to sneeze at (although SH is bundled in there). Could be a healthy addition to these small companies and also HPE, that is valued at $20b when sales are $30b per year.
Nah. A lot of our former employees there. I’m sure they took lessons learned and the IP in their heads with them and applied it there. No need to buy our stuff.
The sd storage companies might see some value in the IP. We should contacts pure, rubrik etc
If it can be split off as a profitable entity with people, and revenue, it would be good idea. if the revenue however is due to bundled SH, then it will be tough. each of these things except SCON has to be profitable on its own to be able to sell it.
I think they actually did try to sell to them last year.
SF isn’t HCI (or not just HCi). It’s a unique product—which is why it needs strong marketing behind it. They should sell the IP to Dell or HPE so they can bundle it into their storage and servers.
Hpe already had simplivity. Hci has evolved in last 7 yrs, Gartner won’t even consider SF a proper Hci solution.
Regarding SteelApp.. I'm fairly certain Riverbed took a bath selling it to Brocade.. And the thing that really STINGS (pun intended) is that Brocade sold it to F5 - one of SteelApp's direct competitors. Again, lack of forward vision and the associated training/carrots/kpi for the Sales team meant we lost a marketable edge.
Not even mentioning that we had to develop a new proxy solution for the SteelHead's because of it.
I'm actually gobsmacked that SteelFusion hasn't been sold off to HPE yet. Although, now HPE has a HCB solution by partnering with Nutanix, so that ship has probably sailed.
Anything new going on guys?
Let's not forget about Zeus and the whole ADC market. The M&A folks were on the right track however, sales, some technical folks and compensation just didn't line up back then and hence we sold it. Who would've known that ADC (now basically turning into service mesh) would've been such a huge hit with modern application infrastructure folks today. Perhaps this wasn't our original intent on buying an ADC company but would've, at the minimum, updated how we process and compensate 100% pure SaaS-based sales - probably would've learned how to swallow that fish a heck of a lot sooner but we were stuck in our old ways of perpetual and hardware-based selling style.
Riverbed had a lot of very smart folks, just too bad the supporting cast wasn't there and, far too often, the "easy button" was always being pressed.
The old guard at Riverbed (original) were very future-focused but I believe their fallacy was that they were too far ahead and another example is SSL optimization quite a while back. Be aware, while sales does have a good "feel" for the future, they can also be wrong - eg., the Citrix optimization module.
The problem with Riverbed is no one understands anything else other than our own stuff. SteelFusion, unfortunately, is an example of having less-than-stellar thinkers because edge computing (ala Azure, AWS and probably GCP) is going to happen. We could've done well in positioning this product 4 years ago in the IOT and ML space - I think a specific SEM was mentioning this. BUT due to many folks at Riverbed "just not understanding tech trends", this boat passed us up and now the big cloud vendors are going to go with their own hardware product. As for SteelStore, that was FAR too bleeding edge and this was just bad marketing timing. If we had waited another2 years for AWS and Azure to mature a bit more, then we could've leverage this product as primary or secondary storage with a cloud back - sounds similar to Cohesity and Rubrik doesn't it - super large TAM's but timing (and survival) was executed better there.
At the end of the day, looking too far into the future can be dangerous, sales isn't always right, even the old guard Chief Scientist and CTO thought too far ahead. What we needed were better field technical leaders like the first line SEM's. Too bad at Riverbed, SEM's are trained to become dumb but there are a select few whom are very sharp and has that strong balance of tech trends, technical depth and hyper customer focus.