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10 Years Young: Highlights from My Decade at Riverbed

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Bob Gilbert

April 16th marked the 10-year anniversary of Riverbed Technology shipping the first, revolutionary Riverbed SteelHead™ WAN optimization appliance. Bob Gilbert, now chief evangelist and senior director of marketing at Riverbed, was there at the start, so we asked him to recount some anecdotes and highlights from the once-fledgling company’s history. Take it away, Bob.

Cold calling a CEO

In December of 2002 I was working for a file-caching startup and looking for other opportunities. A friend pointed out a small startup that had just gotten their seed funding. My friend said it was risky because it was just a tiny company with no product, but he thought they had an interesting idea. So he gave me the contact and I called the CEO, Jerry Kennelly. Yep, I did a cold call to the CEO.

Somehow I got an interview with Jerry and Dr. Steve McCanne, cofounder of Riverbed, and he wrote on the whiteboard this idea he had for a technology. There was no product yet, just the idea for what would become WAN optimization. The idea struck me like a bolt of lightning. What I saw was very, very disruptive. If it actually worked, it would break new ground. It was huge!

Long story short, they hired me to help take this product to market and work with engineering to define the initial feature set. I went home to my wife and said “This is going to be absolutely huge!”

Her, instantly: “I’ve heard that before.”

“No, but I’m telling you the truth this time!”

That magic moment

The next great moment came in the process of building SteelHead for the first time. One day David Wu, who’s now our CTO, came to my desk and said, “Bob, I have something to show you.”

He pulled up a window on my PC and did a drag and drop of a very large file across a very slow network [via  a network simulator]. Other than an early prototype, it was the first time I’d ever seen the product demonstrated, because he’d literally just built it. It was still warm to the touch, and it worked.

The 1‐2‐3

After our very successful IPO in 2006, we continued to grow rapidly. Why were we so successful on this crazy rocket ship ride, growing so quickly to $800 million in revenue?

I think there were three key reasons:

  • First, the market conditions. At the time, bandwidth was still a big cost consideration, so any way you could help companies reduce their bandwidth costs was huge.
  • Second, there was also market momentum around consolidating and centralizing all of IT’s difficult-to-manage, costly infrastructure back to the datacenter. But IT people couldn’t do it because they had the challenges with latency and distance and location. Riverbed solved that.
  • Finally, we had a very innovative and disruptive product that was far ahead of everybody else. Our #1 competitor at the time was Cisco, the 800 lb. gorilla. But we had a better product that was essentially faster, more scalable, and simpler to deploy. We were firing on all cylinders.

Crazy San Francisco Giants guy is born

Right before we went public in 2006 we had this internal bet. We called it team orange. We bet that if our stock ever hit $50 a share each of us would dye our hair orange.

Guess what happened In October 2010? Yep. So yours truly went to the salon down the street and had my hair dyed Riverbed orange. It was so orange that my wife wouldn’t go out with me for months.

As I came out of the salon a TV news truck pulled up alongside to interview me about being such a fanatical SF Giants baseball fan, as their colors are orange and black. (They were in the World Series at the time.) I ended up on several news segments as the crazy Giants guy! You can watch a short clip here.

Fuel for the future

Eventually we found that WAN optimization, while a critical component to solving performance challenges, was really a piece of what essentially was a much broader platform-level solution.

This was when we started broadening our mandate. We made acquisitions such as Mazu Networks and CACE Technology, which lead to Riverbed SteelCentral™ network performance management (NPM) products. We acquired OPNET, which took us into application performance management (APM).

Plus we further innovated on our performance technology. Riverbed SteelFusion™ is a great example of that. It’s exciting, as we now have a great platform-level solution set that addresses all key aspects of the performance challenges that enterprises have.

Being able to analyze, diagnose, and solve performance problems, we feel really provides tremendous value to our customers. And Riverbed, with our Application Performance Platform built on innovative technologies spanning WAN optimization, performance management, branch-converged infrastructure, application delivery, and cloud storage, really has a great solution to solve a lot of problems. This will fuel Riverbed for years to come.

See, I really wasn’t pulling one over on my wife.

Read more from Bob Gilbert at his page the Riverbed blog. And follow him on Twitter at @bobegilbert.


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