Riverbed Technology LLC is an American

information technology Information technology (IT) is a set of related fields within information and communications technology (ICT), that encompass computer systems, software, programming languages, data processing, data and information processing, and storage. Inf ...

company. Its products consist of software and hardware focused on Unified Observability, Network Visibility, End User Experience Management, network performance monitoring,

application performance management In the fields of information technology and systems management, application performance management (APM) is the monitoring and management of the performance and availability of software applications. APM strives to detect and diagnose complex appli ...

, and

wide area network A wide area network (WAN) is a telecommunications network that extends over a large geographic area. Wide area networks are often established with leased telecommunication circuits. Businesses, as well as schools and government entities, use ...

s (WANs), including SD-WAN and

WAN optimization WAN optimization is a collection of techniques for improving data transfer across wide area networks (WANs). In 2008, the WAN optimization market was estimated to be $1 billion, and was to grow to $4.4 billion by 2014 according to Gartner, a techn ...

. Riverbed has its headquarters in

Redwood City Redwood City is a city on the San Francisco Peninsula in the Bay Area of Northern California, approximately south of San Francisco and northwest of San Jose. The city's population was 84,292 according to the 2020 census. The Port of Redwo ...

, near

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

. Founded in 2002, the company was recapitalized in December 2021 and its majority shareholder was

Apollo Global Management Apollo Global Management, Inc. is an American asset management firm that primarily invests in alternative assets. , the company had $548 billion of assets under management, including $392 billion invested in credit, including mezzanine capita ...

at the time. In 2023, it was acquired by

private equity firm A private equity firm or private equity company (often described as a financial sponsor) is an investment management company that provides financial backing and makes investments in the private equity of a Startup company, startup or of an existin ...

Vector Capital.

History

Jerry Kennelly, former CEO, and Steve McCanne, former CTO, founded a technology company in May, 2002, originally named NBT (Next Big Thing) Technology. The company became Riverbed Technology in 2003. Kennelly and McCanne led internal development of the first SteelHead appliances, the 500, 1000, 2000, and 5000 models, and the first SteelHead shipped in April 2004 to

Environment Canada Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC; )Environment and Climate Change Canada is the applied title under the Federal Identity Program; the legal title is Department of the Environment (). is the Ministry (government department), department ...

. Riverbed stock began trading on NASDAQ September 21, 2006. Riverbed opened up an off-site location at Research Park, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before 2009. In February 2014, the US hedge fund Elliott Management Corporation made a $3.36 billion offer to acquire Riverbed (after a bid of $3.08 was rejected). In October 2014

NetApp NetApp, Inc. is an American data infrastructure company that provides unified data storage, integrated data services, and cloud operations (CloudOps) solutions to enterprise customers. The company is based in San Jose, California. It has ranked ...

acquired Riverbed's SteelStore line of

data backup In information technology, a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form, referring to the process of doing so, is "back up", ...

and protection products, which NetApp later renamed as "AltaVault". On December 15, 2014, Riverbed announced it would be acquired by private equity investment firm

Thoma Bravo Thoma Bravo, LP is an American private equity and growth capital firm based in Chicago, Illinois. It is known for being particularly active in acquiring enterprise software companies and has over $130billion in assets under management . It ...

, LLC and Teachers’ Private Capital, the private investor department of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. The value was estimated at $3.6 billion, and closed in April 2015. On April 3, 2018, Riverbed announced the retirement of co-founder and CEO Jerry M. Kennelly and appointment of Paul Mountford as CEO. On June 12, 2019, Riverbed announced it would resell Versa Networks SD-WAN products. On August 8, 2019, Xirrus was sold to Cambium Networks. On October 22, 2019, Rich McBee became president and CEO. On June 9, 2021, Dan Smoot became president and CEO. On December 7, 2021, Riverbed completed recapitalization, with

as majority shareholder. On July 11, 2023, Riverbed was acquired by private-equity firm Vector Capital, with Dave Donatelli named as new chief executive officer.

Acquisitions

On February 20, 2009, Riverbed completed the acquisition of Mazu Networks. The Mazu products, which were initially renamed Cascade (and in 2014 became part of Riverbed SteelCentral), analyze network traffic to provide information about the interactions of and dependencies between users, applications and systems. On October 21, 2010, Riverbed acquired CACE Technologies, and folded its Shark network analysis product and Pilot interface product into the Riverbed Cascade product suite. CACE was also the corporate sponsor of the

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

network protocol A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics, and synchronization of ...

analyzer product

Wireshark Wireshark is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source packet analyzer. It is used for computer network, network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development, and education. Originally named Ethereal, ...

. Riverbed assumed corporate sponsorship. In November 2010, Riverbed acquired Global Protocols, LLC, a provider of

satellite A satellite or an artificial satellite is an object, typically a spacecraft, placed into orbit around a celestial body. They have a variety of uses, including communication relay, weather forecasting, navigation ( GPS), broadcasting, scient ...

optimization to the defense marketplace. Its SkipWare product, a

proprietary {{Short pages monitor