Riverbed plans on expansion

WAN optimisation provider is planning on opening an office in Dubai and a training centre for the MENA region soon.

Riverbed is set to take its presence in the Middle East to the next level with the imminent opening of an office in Dubai, which is expected to happen in the next few months.

"We have been active in the region for three years and we are ready to take our operations upwards and onwards. The opening of offices in the Middle East and the growing of our local resources will enable Riverbed to respond more rapidly to the demand for our solutions and give us the ability to provide local support," says Mohammed Karzazi, regional director MEA, Riverbed.

 

According to Karzazi, Riverbed's expansion into the region comes in response to strong customer and partner demand. "Organisations are recognising the importance of optimising WAN performance for a broad range of applications and services, including IT consolidation, back-up and disaster recovery, and application acceleration."

Riverbed has over 100 customers across the Middle East ranging across a number of sectors including banking and finance, oil and gas and telecoms enterprises.

With the Middle East proving to be one of Riverbed's fastest growing markets, the solutions provider is seeking to leverage its wide area data service (WDS) to mass effect.

There is a huge need for our product on the WDS side of things because any company which has more than one office has a potential need for the solution. Bandwidth is very expensive and many companies are starting to think about IT consolidation," explains Karzazi.

Other WAN issues that Riverbed's WDS is designed to address include those related to back-up and replication of data. Karzazi believes that while many companies may have products capable of solving one or two of the issues only Riverbed has the only solution capable of solving them all.

In a WAN optimisation market that is becoming increasingly consolidated Riverbed is facing growing competition globally. However, Karzazi remains confident that through its Steelhead appliances, Riverbeds position as a market leader will remain secure.

"Companies worldwide, and the Middle East, are especially susceptible to application performance problems on WANs because of both the high cost of bandwidth, and the very high latency inherent in satellite networks applications," says Karzazi.

He continues to explain, "Riverbed's multi-layer optimisation solutions are the only WAN acceleration solutions that address all the aspects of application performance in one appliance. Steelhead appliances improve the performance of applications over wide area networks by up to 100 times. This is crucial to enterprises and a major benefit to boot."

Riverbed recently announced the launch of the Riverbed partner network (RPN) together with the value added reseller (VAR) and value added distributor (VAD) programs for EMEA.

"These programmes will allow us to enable and reward all our partners and very soon we will be opening our first ever training office in the MENA region," says Karzazi.