Riverbed Acquires CACE Technologies

Riverbed Technology announced the acquisition of CACE Technologies, Inc., in packet capture and analysis products for wireless and wireline networks and the corporate sponsor of Wireshark, a popular network protocol analyzer.

With the addition of CACE Technologies’ product line, Riverbed will add network traffic recording, analysis and inspection to its Cascade network and application visibility solution. By bringing together the high-performing capabilities of these two products with wide area network (WAN) optimization, Riverbed will with an end-to-end IT performance solution that allows customers to understand application performance over networks, optimize the performance of those applications and then intelligently consolidate their IT into private or public clouds.

As organizations delve into strategic IT initiatives such as virtualization, IT consolidation and cloud computing, they are increasingly more dependent on the WAN. According to recent industry surveys, effectively managing the WAN to deliver end–to-end application performance has emerged as a top priority. Riverbed currently offers Cascade for enterprise-wide application performance analysis, discovery and dependency mapping, and proactive alerting on network and application performance bottlenecks. CACE Technologies’ products, Shark Appliance and Pilot Console, offer a solution thanks to their user interface, their performance, and their integration with Wireshark. The combination of the two product lines will provide a complete application-aware network performance management (NPM) solution that spans the entire process of application discovery, end-to-end performance monitoring, and deep packet-level recording and analysis.

"The network is core to doing business today, and understanding the performance of applications across the network is critical. With the addition of CACE, Riverbed will be able to offer customers the tools they need to resolve the toughest performance issues and ensure the success of their network-driven businesses," said Jerry Kennelly, chief executive officer at Riverbed.

Embracing the Wireshark Community
In addition to developing network analysis solutions, CACE is the sponsor of the Wireshark and WinPcap open source tools, a widely used tool for network traffic capture and analysis. The Wireshark community has millions of users and more than 400,000 downloads a month.

"Riverbed understands the strong, independent and community-driven nature of Wireshark. We are dedicated to keeping Wireshark open and will continue with a strong commitment to the community as it continues to guide and develop the product just as it has in the past," added Kennelly.

Leveraging the Riverbed Footprint
In Computer Networks
Thousands of customers, including enterprises and government organizations, leverage Riverbed WAN optimization, including Steelhead products, to improve remote and mobile employee productivity, enable private clouds, and provide enterprise-wide network and application visibility. With Steelhead appliances deployed broadly in data centers and branch offices, Riverbed is one of very few vendors in the industry with a footprint throughout the enterprise network. This wide distribution means that network managers can now enhance their performance management strategies by adding packet capture in the branch office without the need to invest in additional packet capture devices.

Today, Steelhead appliances provide packet capture capabilities out of the box. As a result of the acquisition, Steelhead appliances will work in conjunction with CACE products and Wireshark to provide a visibility solution for organizations of all sizes.