Riverbed Expands Operations in North America

Opens Offices in Canada to Enable Global and Regional Enterprises to Speed Application Performance and Improve Collaboration.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: RVBD) announced today the launch of operations in Canada with the opening of offices in Toronto, Ontario. Riverbed's new Canadian office will allow Riverbed® to best meet the needs of distributed organizations throughout Canada as they seek to solve the problems associated with application performance over wide area networks (WANs).

“Riverbed’s first customer was a Canadian company,” said Jerry Kennelly, CEO and president of Riverbed. “Riverbed’s decision to expand operations in North America is driven by customer and partner demand, as organizations recognize the importance of optimizing WAN performance for a broad range of applications and services, including IT consolidation, backup and disaster recovery, and application acceleration. We look forward to working with our Canadian partners to meet the needs of distributed enterprises.”

Riverbed has developed relationships with leading reseller partners across Canada, including British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. As part of this release, Riverbed is announcing Canadian customers SECOR and Wardrop Engineering, both of which worked with partners to deploy Riverbed’s Steelhead® appliances.

SECOR was founded in 1975 and today is the largest independent strategy consulting firm in Canada, serving prestigious clients in North America and Europe. In addition to its Montreal offices, the company has operations in Paris and Toronto. The company is organized into three groups: SECOR Consulting assists top teams of large North American companies with strategic and global expansion concerns; SECOR Europe focuses on top teams of European companies; and SECOR-TAKTIK specializes in mid-sized Quebec companies that must constantly adapt to the changing realities of the market.

SECOR deployed a Microsoft SharePoint Intranet to enable collaboration between its three sites, including the ability to quickly and easily share large PowerPoint and Word documents. However, downloads of typical files of 25-30 MB often took 10-12 minutes to open and file replication was nearly impossible. The company turned to Montreal-based NOVIPRO for a solution. NOVIPRO is a rapidly growing company and registered Riverbed reseller that has, since 1993, successfully implemented IT projects for small, medium and large sized businesses. NOVIPRO has developed a unique approach that capitalizes on the skills of its team to address its clients' challenges in areas that include technological infrastructure design, software solutions, IT recovery, archiving and other IT issues. NOVIPRO recommended that SECOR consider Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances to enable collaboration between the company’s North American and European sites. Following installation of the Steelhead appliances, the same files that once took 10-12 minutes to download now take 10-12 seconds.

“Riverbed has delivered performance beyond our expectations,” said Joanne Couture, Director – Service to Professionals at SECOR. “Our users in Paris are now working as if they were in Montreal. Riverbed has delivered LAN-like quality over our WAN.”

In addition to improving application performance, the Steelhead appliances have reduced the amount of traffic traversing the network from 1.34 GB to 291 MB, a 5X decrease, freeing bandwidth and allowing the company to delay a bandwidth upgrade indefinitely.

Wardrop Engineering has also deployed Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances. Wardrop is an award-winning international consulting firm providing innovative solutions through integrated multi-disciplined engineering, environmental, and information technology services. The company has a team of more than 850 from which to draw expertise, and was recently named, for the fifth time, to the list of Canada’s Top 100 Employers. Wardrop specializes in the forest products, infrastructure, product development, mining and minerals, nuclear, oil and gas, and power sectors.

Wardrop has sites across Canada and in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Teams often work collaboratively, transferring a variety of documents, including very large computer-aided design (CAD) files, across the country. In addition, Wardrop has a centralized Oracle-based financial and project management application, located in its Winnipeg office. With a hybrid network that includes centralized, regional and local IT, the company needed a flexible solution that would allow them to speed both the transfers of files and access to its centralized database, while accommodating the design of its network. Wardrop attempted to overcome its performance issues across the WAN with raw bandwidth; however, performance was still unacceptable.

Working closely with Gibraltar Solutions, a registered Riverbed reseller and value-added solution provider, the company deployed Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances as a solution. Gibraltar Solutions optimizes large enterprise IT environments, with compelling value, in the areas of infrastructure consolidation, virtualization solutions, access solutions, application distribution, security assessment/operations, as well as process/project management. To-date, Wardrop has deployed Steelhead appliances at 12 sites across Canada and in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

“Riverbed accommodates the flexible nature of our business where project teams are based in different parts of the country,” said Bill Ip, CIO at Wardrop. “In smaller offices, we have been able to reduce the number of email and file data servers. Employees remotely work as if local. Having the Steelhead appliances deployed at all of our sites gives us the flexibility to allow all employees access to all data, regardless of location.”

Wardrop has also reduced bandwidth usage by up to 5X, allowing the company to reduce its current expenditure on bandwidth and delay future network upgrades.

“Users are now able to efficiently and quickly get data from other offices,” continued Ip. “With the Riverbed-enabled performance, remote users are not even aware that they are accessing files over the WAN. Based on the performance, they assume that they are opening local files.”

Riverbed Awarded Patent on Core WDS Technology

Proven Technology Speeds Application Performance at Remote Sites by up to 100X and Overcomes the Limitations of Geography for Global Businesses

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:RVBD) announced today that the company has been issued U.S. Patent 7,120,666 for its “Transaction Accelerator for Client-Server Communication Systems,” which is becoming core technology in wide-area data services (WDS) solutions.

“Riverbed® was founded with a vision to create integrated and intelligent solutions to the networking, application, and storage issues that together slow the performance of distributed networks and cause remote sites to suffer painfully slow application and file transfer speeds,” said Steve McCanne, chief technology officer at Riverbed. “This patent reflects our technology leadership in WDS and related solutions and our willingness to protect our intellectual property.”

Buy, Outperform or Neutral Rating for Riverbed Technologies

Riverbed Technology Inc. (NASDAQ: RVBD) was initiated at Robert W. Baird with a Neutral and $18 target. Baird considers Riverbed the market share leader in WAN Acceleration and expects the company to grow revenues in excess of 240% in 2006. They believe current valuation suggests near-perfect execution going forward.
Piper Jaffray initiated Riverbed with a Market Perform and $18 target citing valuation and additional competition.
Check out Gartner's examination of the currrent state of the market here

Cramer backflips: wants to get in bed with Riverbed Tech

Posted Oct 13th 2006 6:22PM by Jon Ogg

In comments on his MAD MONEY this evening, Cramer was giving more advice for a record-breaking market. He said a great way to make money in a rally is to find some of the lesser-known names that have been overlooked.

[Oddly enough, this is a complete backflip from his advice last night, when he said to go with the big tech titans. But who's keeping track? Ahem.]

Today he said Riverbed Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:RVBD) is one that could be a big big winner like his old DivX Inc. (NASDAQ:DIVX) call. He said RVBD is up 20% but you might not have missed it. He said they are actually beating Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) at its own game. Cramer said this is a great speculative tech stock.

Cramer said Riverbed is actually a best-of-breed WAN product company, but it isn't even profitable yet. He said the company's revenue growth has been large, and its technology is the best out there. Riverbed currently has deals with HP, McData, NEC, and others. He thinks the new estimates for RVBD are conservative, and it could blow away estimates one quarter out.

RVBD closed down 4% at $18.05 in regular trading but popped up 12% to $20.25 in after-hours after Cramer touted this stock.

Jon Ogg is a partner in 24/7 Wall St., LLC; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

Riverbed Technology, Inc. to Report Third Quarter Financial Results on Thursday, October 26, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:RVBD) today announced it will release financial results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2006 shortly after the close of market on Thursday, October 26, 2006. Riverbed® will host a conference call and live webcast at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time (2:00 p.m. Pacific Time) that day to discuss the third quarter results.

For parties in the United States and Canada, call 800-257-6566 to access the conference call. International parties can access the call at 303-275-2170.

Riverbed will offer a live webcast of the conference call, which will also include forward-looking information. The webcast will be accessible from the "Investor Relations" section of Riverbed’s website (www.riverbed.com). The webcast will be archived for a period of 30 days. A telephonic replay of the conference call will also be available two hours after the call and will run for two days. To hear the replay, parties in the United States and Canada should call 800-405-2236 and enter passcode 11073351. International parties should call 303-590-3000 and enter passcode 11073351. In addition, Riverbed’s press release will be accessible from Riverbed’s website before the conference call begins.

About Riverbed

Riverbed Technology is the performance leader in wide-area data services (WDS) solutions for companies worldwide. By enabling application performance over the wide area network (WAN) that is orders of magnitude faster than what users experience today, Riverbed is changing the way people work, and enabling a distributed workforce that can collaborate as if they were local. Additional information about Riverbed (Nasdaq:RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com.

Liz Claiborne Inc. Selects Riverbed’s Steelhead Appliances for Deployment Across Its Global Cisco Network

Application Acceleration Enables Worldwide Business Operations and Collaboration

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:RVBD) announced today that Liz Claiborne Inc. has selected and deployed Riverbed’s Steelhead® wide-area data services (WDS) appliances at 37 sites across North America, in Asia, and in Europe and plans to deploy more than 60 additional Steelhead appliances at sites across Europe, and at sites in the Middle East and in Asia.

Liz Claiborne Inc. designs and markets an extensive range of branded women's and men's apparel, accessories and fragrance products. The company has a diverse portfolio of quality brands that are available domestically and internationally via wholesale and retail channels. The more than 40 brands in the Liz Claiborne Inc. portfolio are available at more than 30,000 points of sale worldwide.

Liz Claiborne Inc. has locations across the globe, including distribution centers, and management, sales, finance, and operations offices. Sites are located in North America, Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, India, China and Southeast Asia. To accommodate the growth of its business in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and integrate worldwide operations, the company sought to both deploy custom applications designed for the global retail business and improve response times of existing applications over the wide area network (WAN). These include their ERP application, and Microsoft Office, Exchange 2003, CommVault backup and SharePoint.

Liz Claiborne Inc. maintains a central datacenter in North Bergen, New Jersey and regional hubs in New York City, Santa Fe Springs, California, Hong Kong and Amsterdam. Some applications, such as the company’s ERP and finance applications, are centralized while others, including email and backup, are located in regional hubs.

Global users were experiencing very slow application response times accessing files not located in their offices. Users often had to wait several minutes to download financial spreadsheets and other files, significantly reducing productivity. In addition, Liz Claiborne Inc. sought to deploy new applications, in a centralized architecture critical to the company’s competitiveness worldwide. However, network congestion and the scarcity and expense of bandwidth in many remote locations made this task difficult. The company sought to address these issues by deploying a WDS solution.

“After extensive evaluation of other solutions we selected Riverbed® over the competition,” said Bob Czukkermann, supervisor of server infrastructure at Liz Claiborne Inc. “The Steelhead appliance was able to optimize all of our important applications and delivered the best performance over our global Cisco network. It was also the easiest to deploy and manage.”

Liz Claiborne Inc. has deployed the Steelhead appliances at 37 sites in North America, Asia and Europe. The company plans additional installations in the next eighteen months at 60 sites across Europe, and at sites in Turkey, Sir Lanka, Hong Kong, South China, Taiwan, Indonesia and India.

“It now takes us less than 10 minutes to get a site up and running with a Steelhead appliance, including time for testing,” continued Czukkermann. “The boxes are shipped pre-configured by Riverbed. Our technical staff and a user in the remote site manage the process in a single phone call. Riverbed has made deployment to sites across the globe simple and painless.”

Since installation of the Steelhead appliances, user performance has improved dramatically. Downloads that once took several minutes can be accomplished in thirty seconds. And, the Steelhead appliances have reduced network traffic by over 80%, allowing Liz Claiborne Inc. to deploy its custom applications for use worldwide. In addition, while backup over the WAN was not an original concern at the company, Liz Claiborne Inc. has been able to reduce backup windows of CommVault from 16 to six hours.

Riverbed Expands Global Presence in the Netherlands, and Establishes new Operations in Spain

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:RVBD) today announced the expansion of its global operations with the opening of offices in Spain and the Netherlands. Riverbed's new Spanish office will allow Riverbed® to best meet the needs of distributed organizations on the Iberian Peninsula as they seek to solve the problems associated with application performance over wide area networks (WANs). Riverbed has expanded its Netherlands operations with the opening of a sales office in Rotterdam. Riverbed already maintains support staff in the Netherlands as part of its commitment to delivering 24x7 "follow the sun” support to customers worldwide.

“We have a strong and dedicated commitment to our European customers and partners,” said Marcus Chambers, vice president of EMEA at Riverbed. “The expansion of our operations into Spain and the growth of our operations in the Netherlands allow us to work more closely with our existing local partners and customers and to establish stronger relationships in new markets.”

Riverbed’s decision to expand operations in Europe is driven by customer and partner demand, as organizations recognize the importance of optimizing WAN performance for a broad range of applications and services, including IT consolidation, backup and disaster recovery, and application acceleration.

Shares of Riverbed Technology Leap in IPO

The San Francisco-based company, which makes network infrastructure products for computer systems, saw its stock rise $5.55, or 57 percent, from the IPO price to close at $15.30 Thursday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Riverbed's shares opened at $14.60 on the Nasdaq, well above the IPO price of $9.75 a share.

A total of 8.8 million shares were sold to investors, and the deal priced above the expected range of $7 a share to $8.50 a share. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. managed the offering.

Riverbed Technology Inc to IPO this week

Riverbed Technology Set for IPO (RVBD) As Companies Look to Boost Performance of Wide Area Networks NEW YORK (AP) -- Riverbed Technology Inc., which develops technology to help boost the performance of applications shared over networks, is set to go public on the Nasdaq this week, as demand for its products grows along with competition.

Riverbed Technology, Inc. is the performance leader in wide-area data services (WDS) solutions.

By enabling application performance over the wide area network (WAN) that is orders of magnitude faster than what users experience today, Riverbed is changing the way people work, and enabling a distributed workforce that can collaborate as if they were local.

The Wall Street Journal named Riverbed the winner of its 2005 Technology Innovation Award in the Network/ Broadband/Internet category. In addition, InfoWorld has named Riverbed's Steelhead appliance "Technology of the Year" in both 2005 and 2006, as the "Best WAN Accelerator".

Riverbed's award-winning solutions are available worldwide from resellers who are members of the Riverbed Partner Network, from Riverbed OEM partners, or directly from Riverbed.

Riverbed was founded in 2002 and is based in San Francisco, California.

Riverbed Technology, Inc. (IPO) [RVBD]
Click on the link to view the Riverbed Technology, Inc. (IPO) presentation at
RetailRoadshow.com.
retailroadshow - http://www.retailroadshow.com