Riverbed plots to take the network from IT blocker to IT enabler

Automating the network will help transform it from a roadblock to enterprise digitisation to a means to support and measure its success, helping enterprises achieve their IT goals. So says Riverbed’s new CEO, Paul Mountford, who, after stepping up to the role in April 2018, is embarking on a mission to do exactly that.

After 16 years at Cisco and a couple of years in the world of startups, Mountford joined Riverbed in August 2014 as chief sales officer, and was named CEO earlier this year following the retirement of firebrand company founder Jerry Kennelly.

“The thing that fascinated me about Riverbed at the time was they’d pretty much grown massively on the back of one product, but they had these great assets they’d also bought that they hadn’t really made much of,” he says.

Mountford was offered his first role at Riverbed on the basis that it was likely to go private within a few months – it did – and that would give him an opportunity to help retool the company to take advantage of the fast-changing world of networks.

As analysts noted at the time, Riverbed had largely become synonymous with wide area network (WAN) optimisation, arguably to the detriment of its ability to execute in other areas, something Mountford does not dispute.

“The principal contributor to the company has always been WAN optimisation, but since I’ve been here, we’ve grown the other sides of the business, and now it’s a lot less of a contributor than it was,” he says. “It was 90% of the company’s business, but now digital experience management is what’s growing the fastest.”

So what exactly is digital experience? It certainly feels like one of those ill-defined concept buzzwords beloved of marketers who are not entirely sure what they are marketing.

But according to Mountford, Riverbed’s network performance heritage leaves it in a good position to capitalise on it.

“To be honest with you, it’s what we’ve been doing for years,” he says. “Everything we do is around network performance, or around the performance of applications on the network, I should say.

“Everything we do is around network performance, or around the performance of applications on the network”

Paul Mountford, Riverbed

“Our experience and knowledge is in applications with the network being the delivery point, and so we think we have a good basis for the company, given all the assets we have, to really be able to drive that.”

Today, says Mountford, initial conversations with customers always involve asking how far they have got with digitisation, and how they are managing and measuring the process. Most of the time people know this is an important aspect of their digital transformation, but can’t really answer the question.

“There’s a huge gap around being able to measure the digital experience they’re going through,” he says. “If you went to the board and said ‘hey, I want to spend all this money but I can’t measure it, but is it OK if I do it?’, you’d be thrown out of the window, right? It’s a crazy concept, and yet it happens in IT transitions.

“Now we’re not saying we can provide all the digital elements – that’s what everybody else does. The issue is, how do you measure it?

“Anybody with a smart tool can measure application performance on the code of their newly delivered applications, but if they can’t see how it performs over the network, all they’re doing is showing a thing in a silo that they’ve measured.”

What Mountford hopes to achieve is a solution that will do exactly that, but, perhaps more importantly, will do it by first measuring the human impact, that is to say how the frontline application experience is perceived by end-users, whether they are employees or customers on fixed or wireless connections.

The theory goes that any problems that crop up can then be isolated relative to where in the IT stack they occur – at the application, network or server level, and once that information is available to the CIO, says Mountford, IT teams can start to solve problems much more quickly, without arguments between the network team and the DevOps team, for example.

That is why it is now becoming so important to break Riverbed’s various business units out of their silos to interlock around joint opportunities.

“For example, a customer today that wants to buy our Wi-Fi solution, if they attach Aternity [Riverbed’s recently acquired desktop monitoring suite] to that, we can show end-user experience at the endpoint,” says Mountford. “That’s already showing itself to be a hot opportunity and we’ve got a number of customers who have bought it.”

Mountford has already begun to recruit more data scientists to start work on crunching the vast amount of network and user data that will be required to make the project a sellable reality. There is a particular focus on building indices for specific enterprise verticals – the idea being that customers can compare their own digital experience and performance with those of their peers.