BANGALORE, INDIA: The Y2K problem in a way was a blessing in disguise. It is after this 'scare' that the companies across the globe started looking at reducing costs. One of the things that emerged on every CIO's mind that time was to consolidate IT infrastructure, which could be done by reducing the number of data centers.

The companies then started to look at global arena. Their aspirations to go global forced them to consolidate their IT infrastructure. As the distance between the user and the application increased, the problem of slow application response also started cropping up.

This is when the birth of Riverbed happened. The company concentrated on solving problems related to application performance. It dealt with CIOs' issues and helped them innovate. In this interview with CIOL, Anil Batra, its India MD, talks about the company and its offerings.

CIOL: Why is Wide Area Network (WAN) important?

Batra: The most critical part of any organization is productivity. Every company is looking to increase productivity with lesser number of workforce. They are also looking to enhance performance. We have today gone from just a WAN optimization controller to a complete performance platform.

We take care of the bandwidth, have algorithms that reduce the costs that are associated with bandwidths by de-duplicating it. Hence, data that has already gone across the network need not to be sent again. As a result, the next time you have to send data, it is only the key that goes, as the data has already gone and the new one gets indexed to that. This process helps the cost of bandwidth to be reduced.

Suppose that you are working on your PC and try to get access to an application, before you start receiving data, you will have to send requests followed by an acknowledgment. You will have to send another request and the process continues till you get a response. We have come up with a way which helps you take away the chattiness of the application. This helps in a way to improve the performance of an application. We manage the bandwidth, optimize it and also accelerate the application.

CIOL: What are all your products?

We are offering the following solution in this area:

a. Steelhead: The Riverbed Steelhead products dramatically improve WAN performance for a wide range of applications and scale – from individual remote workers to small branch offices to the biggest data centers. These products also offers the most comprehensive approach to application acceleration and disaster recovery across the WAN.

b. Stingay: Our Riverbed Stingray products control, optimize and secure the services that online users receive, by inspecting, transforming, prioritizing and routing application traffic. With Stingray in place, enterprises can enable autoscaling applications on demand, balancing across multiple clouds, and leveraging existing datacenter investments.

c. Cascade: Riverbed Cascade is the first integrated network assessment and acceleration solution. It combines network and application visibility, collects vast amounts of data from devices, and analyzes network behavior to find the source of any performance problems before they affect the end user.

d. Whitewater: Riverbed Whitewater unlocks the efficiency and reliability of public cloud storage for organizations of all sizes. With de-duplication, encryption, network acceleration, and no changes to existing infrastructure, Whitewater makes public cloud storage a secure, low-cost, and reliable storage alternative to tape or on-site disk.