Venugopal Pai VP of Global Alliances at Riverbed

Riverbed Technology announced the promotion of Venugopal Pai to vice president of global alliances.

 In this role Pai will continue to outline the strategy and oversee execution of the alliances program, including jointly developing, marketing and delivering solutions to enterprise customers, thereby driving value to all the companies within the alliances ecosystem.

"Now more than ever CIOs are executing on cost-cutting private cloud initiatives, such as IT centralization, virtualization and data center consolidation, and WAN optimization is a critical component to ensure cost avoidance with each of these initiatives, while also looking to improve overall IT infrastructure performance," said Eric Wolford, senior vice president of business development and marketing, Riverbed. "And, as CIO interest in the public cloud is growing, we know that widespread adoption depends on addressing enterprise application performance concerns over the cloud, WAN optimization is a core enabling technology to accelerate the cloud computing adoption rate. As customers are selecting a WAN optimization solution they evaluate our interoperability with trusted vendors. Our partner relationships, led by Pai, are validation to our customers that they will obtain the maximum efficiency out of their IT investments for their data centers or in the cloud."

Pai joined the Riverbed team in 2006 and has over 20 years of experience working with companies like Hitachi Data Systems and Brocade. After joining Riverbed, Pai oversaw the launch of the Riverbed Technology Alliance (RTA) program, which validates the company’s commitment to delivering to customers the best performance for the broadest range of applications. The RTA program is comprised of member companies whose solutions benefit from Riverbed WAN optimization solutions. Through this program, Riverbed works closely with partners to deliver to customers the best performance for applications and a best in class branch office consolidation strategy that is critical to cost-cutting and IT performance improvements.

Riverbed’s partners include HP ProCurve, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, VMware and Checkpoint, among many others.

As part of the alliances program, Riverbed has made significant strides, including product development and strategic partnerships, to expand its offerings and provide end-to-end consolidation and virtualization solutions to global organizations.

Consolidating IT at Branch Offices
Consolidation and virtualization IT initiatives are helping businesses increase their flexibility and efficiency in delivering valuable services while reducing costs. In 2008 Riverbed introduced the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), a virtualized partition within the Steelhead appliance, which allows customers to deploy applications critical to the branch office as virtualized services on the appliance, enabling them to further consolidate their IT infrastructure and realize the vision of the serverless branch office.

Since its introduction, Riverbed announced an OEM agreement to embed VMware software as the preferred virtualization platform for the RSP. With the VMware platform inside Steelhead appliances, enterprises can further consolidate their IT infrastructure and improve manageability by running up to five remote office virtual edge services, without the need for separate dedicated servers. This approach allows enterprises to improve asset utilization, operational efficiency and business agility, while helping to control IT costs and ensure end-user satisfaction.

In February 2009, Riverbed announced that it has licensed Microsoft Windows Server 2008 for integration on the Steelhead appliance through the RSP. With the combination of Windows Server 2008 infrastructure services and the Riverbed Steelhead appliances, mutual customers can simplify their branch office infrastructure while, at the same time, ensuring application performance for end users.

As its most recent initiative to expand IT consolidation opportunities, Riverbed has teamed with security leader Check Point Software Technologies Ltd, and Web, data and email security leader Websense – allowing customers to address the growing need for additional security at the branch. With the enhanced RSP, customers can now enjoy the industry-leading WAN optimization from Riverbed as well as the best in category security features such as firewall, VPN, antivirus, and Web security from Check Point and Websense on the Steelhead appliance.

Data Center Consolidation
Due to the importance of data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity, organizations continue to invest in data center consolidation efforts and strategic disaster recovery initiatives.

To address the concerns of organizations with large data centers and strategic disaster recovery initiatives, Riverbed recently announced it has obtained EMC qualification for its Steelhead appliances, which allows companies to accelerate disaster recovery processes while reducing overall IT costs, to work with Symmetrix Remote Data Facility/Asynchronous product (SRDF/A). Steelhead appliances can remove a huge amount of repetitive data from the WAN during SRDF/A operations, and dramatically reduce bandwidth requirements associated with protecting more data.

"Our product development and ongoing relationships with influential industry players have allowed us to extend our technology lead and deliver more complete IT infrastructure performance solutions to enterprises looking to get the most out of their IT investments," continued Venugopal Pai, vice president of alliances. "We’re confident we’re addressing the needs of organizations looking to cut costs, while improving IT infrastructure performance through these alliances. Our direction is supported by our over 6,500 customers worldwide. I look forward to continuing our efforts to provide customers with IT infrastructure solutions that both enable cost-cutting IT initiatives and increase employee efficiency."