SD-WAN and Wan Optimization

• SteelHead SD is a Riverbed product that offers "a single, unified orchestration and connectivity fabric across the entire distributed enterprise network with embedded security, optimization, and visibility."
• SteelHead SD offers SD-WAN and Cloud Connectivity. It is constructed on an SD-WAN platform and managed using an understandable natural language policy. The policy travels across data centers, WAN, Cloud, and WLAN/LAN to prevent network silos from deferring innovation.
• SteelHead SD integrates with Zscaler, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services, which enables customers to be more agile with cloud transformation.
• SteelHead SD provides data center architectures and enterprise routing. The product's advanced networking features facilitate the assimilation of SD-WAN to the underlay, which means customers do not have to regulate separate underlay and overlay networks. Also, SteelHead SD allows customers to replace legacy routing apparatuses.
• SteelHead SD promotes performance and visibility enforced by Riverbed's leadership in the WAN optimization market for nearly a decade. SteelHead SD uses market-leading WAN Optimization features in conjunction with market-leading security, visibility, and additional services. These capabilities result in a consistent solution that provides unrivaled application performance.
• SteelHead SD also offers enterprise-grade resiliency and scalability against failures in appliance hardware, software, and WAN uplink promoting non-stop business continuity.
• SteelHead SD provides high ROI, along with a swift payback through operational ease and network infrastructure savings.
• Technical specifications:

SD-WAN and Wan Optimization CompetitIve Advantage

• SteelHead is the leading optimization solution in the industry that supplies a quick delivery of every application through the Hybrid WAN. SteelHead can help IT troubleshoot issues before a user experiences problems.
• SteelHead Wan optimization is simple to set up and swift (up to 15 minutes) and uses three distinct technologies to advance WAN performance, which includes data, transport, and application streamlining.
• Riverbed was awarded the 2017 Fierce Telecom Innovation Award for its innovative SD-WAN and SteelConnect, the 2017 Internet Telephony SD-WAN Excellence Award, Interop Tokyo 2017 - Best in Show for their SD-WAN solution, and Hosting Advice - Developers' Choice Award for WAN optimization.

DEM

• SteelCentral is a SaaS-based digital experience management brand of products that offers end-to-end enterprise monitoring services, clarity across the full stack, along with networks and a "dynamic infrastructure on and off the cloud."
• SteelCentral offers a consolidated Application Performance Management (APM) solution. SteelCentral keeps track of digital experiences from each app within the enterprise portfolio and changes APM into a big data practice.
• SteelCentral AppResponse allows customers to choose the analysis capabilities they require from network forensics, application metrics, web transaction analysis, database analysis, and unified communications analysis. AppResponse also keeps team members on the same page while troubleshooting Sev-1 problems.
• AppResponse Appliances come as: 2180 (SKU: SCAN-2180, 12TB raw and 10TB usable storage, 12TB raw and 10TB usable storage, 32 GB memory, and 4 capture ports), 4180 (SKU: SCAN-4180, 48TB raw and 40TB usable storage, 48TB raw and 40TB usable maximum storage, 64 GB memory, and 8 capture ports), 8180 (SKU: SCAN-8180, requires storage unit, 120TB maximum storage, 128 GB memory, and 8 capture ports), and 8180-plus (SKU: SCAN-8180, requires storage unit, 1,920TB maximum storage, 128 GB memory, and 8 capture ports).
• AppResponse Virtual SKU is available in the following formats: VSCAN-00100 (Hypervisor VMware ESXi 5.5, 6.0, 6.5, Up to 100 GB storage, 100 GB maximum storage, 2GB memory, and 2 capture ports), VSCAN-00500 (Hypervisor VMware ESXi 5.5, 6.0, 6.5, Up to 2 TB storage, 2 TB maximum storage, 2GB memory, and 2 capture ports), and VSCAN-02000 (Hypervisor VMware ESXi 5.5, 6.0, 6.5, Up to 8 TB storage, 8 TB maximum storage, 2GB memory, and 2 capture ports).
• AppResponse Cloud SKU includes VSCAN-AWS-010, hypervisor AWS-EC2, 16GB-8TB storage, 8TB maximum storage, 32 GiB (t2.2xlarge), and 1 capture ports.
• SteelCentral AppInternals offers high-definition, scalable, and cloud-native APM. Customers can advance average time to resolution and reduce the effect of business performance problems, enhance the productivity of the business and IT staff, and dispense high-quality applications. The technical specs include deployment flexibility, data collection, scalability, discovery, rest API, and cloud/container support.
• SteelCentral Aternity provides end-user experience monitoring that promptly evaluates the length of time users wait for applications critical to a business, analyze trends of off-track productivity, and progress ROI.

DEM CompetitIve Advantage

• Riverbed SteelCentral supplies the sole consolidated End User Experience and Application Performance Monitoring solution that records digital experiences for each kind of application within the enterprise portfolio.
• SteelCentral helps the dependability of every business-critical application, whether it is on physical, virtual, or mobile devices.
• With SteelCentral, there is no significant hardware provisioning, server deployment, or capital investment for consumers.
• Riverbed was awarded the 2017 Fierce Telecom Innovation Award for its innovative and industry-leading SteelConnect and SD-WAN.

wan and Sd-wan

• Riverbed WAN protocols and optimization accelerator run under the Steelhead® wide area network (WAN) appliance running Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS®) 7.0 brand. 
•  Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS®) 7.0 supports DP, Citrix ICA, IPv6, end-to-end Kerberos, and video stream splitting.
• Riverbed has bundled its SD-WAN capabilities with its WAN products under the SteelConnect® solution.
• The product excellence of Riverbed WAN accelerator has won multiple awards including Gartner's Magic Quadrant leader for WAN Optimization for nine years.
• Riverbed's WAN has a 50% market share of WAN markets. Despite, Riverbed's leadership in the WAN market it has a low leadership position in the SD-WAN market where Cisco and VMWare are the market leaders. Unfortunately, the majority of network users are shifting from WAN to SD-WAN negatively affecting Riverbed's bottom line.
• Riverbed's acquisitions of Ocedo in 2016 and Xirrus in 2017 significantly improved Riverbed's SD-WAN offerings and intellectual property.
• Ocedo's acquisition brought in innovative software-defined networking solutions that enhanced Riverbed's Software Defined Networks (SDNs) and SD-WAN while disrupting the router market. Xirrus's acquisition introduced high-density and cloud-managed Wi-Fi solutions to the SteelConnect SD-WAN offering.
• Riverbed incorporated the acquisitions intellectual property for the launch of SteelConnect 2.0 that offered a comprehensive SD-WAN solution, WAN optimization, dynamic routing, and end-to-end visibility.

DEM

• Riverside's DEM products for APM and NPM were previously marketed under the Cascade Shark brand.
• Riverbed SteelCentral® is an application monitoring and network performance monitoring platform. It is a re branding of its Cascade Shark brand. SteelCentral® product offering includes end user experience monitoring, application performance management, network performance management, cloud performance management, IT infrastr8cture management, Software as a Service and unified communications management.  
• In 2013, Riverbed partnership with Gigamon enhanced its Cascade Shark Brand by incorporating Gigamon’s time stamping solution in the GigaVUE H Series. Gigamon's partnership improved traffic visibility in Riverbed network and application performance management.
• Riverbed acquisition of OPNET (2012), Mazu Networks (2009), and CACE Technologies (2010) brought in exclusive intellectual property that boosted Riverbed's DEM offerings under the Cascade Shark brand (now, SteelCentral®).
• OPNET acquisition enhanced Riverbed's entry into APM. Mazu Networks and CACE Technologies respectively enhanced macro-level and micro-level network analysis and management. The acquisitions enhanced Riverbed's Cascade Shark brand to become an all-around product offering.

IP court rulings affecting Riverbed's WAN, SD-WAN and DEM products

• In 2008, Riverbed won a case against Quantum for infringing on its data de-duplication technology under U.S. Patent No. 7,116,249. 
• In 2015, Riverbed lost a case against Silver Peak on infringement of its WAN optimization patents. In the settlement of the case, the ruling dictated that both parties should mutual release and cross-license WAN optimization patents across their different patent families. 
•  Haynes and Boone IPR successfully challenged claims of data compression patent infringement by Riverbed of U.S. Patent No. 8,643,513 and U.S. Patent No. 7,378,992 (2017).
• Riverbed is petitioning in trial IPR2018-00656 for the U.S. Patent No. 8,717,204 held by Realtime Data, LLC titled methods for encoding and decoding data.
• Other major patent rulings facing Riverbed include: Orostream LLC v. Riverbed Technology, Inc. (2018); Pimenidis v. The Prudential Insurance Company of America et al. (2017); Riverbed Technology, Inc. v. Realtime Data LLC (2017); CRFD Research Inc. v. Riverbed Technology Inc. (2014); Parallel Networks, LLC v. Riverbed Technology Inc. (2013).

current network patents held by Riverbed

• Method and apparatus for path selection. Granted: June 4, 2019. Patent Number: 10313229
• Large-scale distributed correlation. Granted: May 14, 2019. Patent Number: 10291463
• Rule based alerting in anomaly detection. Granted: May 7, 2019. Patent Number: 10284571  
• Dynamically influencing route re-distribution between an exterior gateway protocol and an interior gateway protocol. Granted: April 16, 2019. Patent Number: 10263882 
• Dual band MIMO antenna and wireless access point. Granted: February 26, 2019. Patent Number: 10218087  
• Capture, analysis, and visualization of concurrent system and network behavior of an application. Granted: September 11, 2018. Patent Number: 10075509
• Connecting transparent network devices to optimize unidirectional network traffic. Granted: August 7, 2018. Patent Number: 10044670
• Packet tracing. Granted: June 19, 2018. Patent Number: 10003509
• Hybrid segment-oriented file server and WAN accelerator. Granted: March 27, 2018. Patent Number: 9930099
• Stitching together partial network topologies. Granted: August 8, 2017. Patent Number: 9729426  
• Persisting large volumes of data in an efficient unobtrusive manner. Granted: March 28, 2017. Patent Number: 9606887
• User-configurable network performance monitors. Granted: February 28, 2017. Patent Number: 9584391
• Optimizing secure communications between a client authenticating server and a mobile client. Granted: February 21, 2017. Patent Number: 9578016 
• Correlating input and output requests between client and server components in a multi-tier application. Granted: January 17, 2017. Patent Number: 9549030
• Method and apparatus for path selection. Granted: December 27, 2016. Patent Number: 9531624
• Native code profiler framework. Granted: October 11, 2016. Patent Number: 9465717  
• Methods and systems for efficient updating of time-aligned graphs in a monitoring system. Granted: October 4, 2016. Patent Number: 9461896 
• End-to-end analysis of transactions in networks with traffic-altering devices. Granted: September 27, 2016. Patent Number: 9455873
• Optimizing communications using client-side reconstruction scripting. Granted: August 2, 201. Patent Number: 9407727  
• Policy aggregation for computing network health. Granted: May 31, 2016. Patent Number: 9356839
• Virtualized data storage system optimizations. Granted: May 24, 2016. Patent Number: 9348842
• In addition to listed Riverbed patents, the company holds another 144 patents.

Research strategy

Threats to wan optimization

Cloud storage

•  Cloud storage is keeping your files in the internet instead of saving it in hard drives on site. (source 11).
• Erik Fritzler, Network World contributor, says that in the cloud-first, high bandwidth world we live in, WAN optimization is soon going to be extinct.
• When discussing cloud access, WAN optimization is said to be limited in its ability to optimize cloud access.
• The writer thought the WAN Optimization golden era was between 2010 and 2012.
• Protocols in use by cloud services are now optimized for a higher performance over slow WAN links.

SD-WAN

• SD-WAN means Software-Defined Wide-Area Network, and it is used to connect enterprise networks over distant geographical points.
• SD-WAN is said to be the "new standard for performance and reliability in modern networks."
• SD-WAN uses lower cost internet circuits.
• SD-WAN also provides more capacity at locations and optimizes performance.

THE ONGOING NEED FOR WAN OPTIMIZATION

INTEGRATION BETWEEN SD-WAN and WAN Optimization IS POSSIBLE

• Cato networks states even with all its advantages, SD-WAN does not solve all issues with WAN traffic.
• Alec Pinkham says SD-WAN makes the packets in the WAN perform better, but does not make those WANs work better.
• That is why some specialists believe both technologies are complementary. The best way to achieve efficiency is by integrating them.
• Zeus Kerravala says that if a person is going to adopt SD-WAN in a company, the best way to give users a better experience is to integrate WAN optimization with it.
• An article by WANSpeak mentions two use cases: "supporting business continuity and disaster recovery," and "chatty protocols" as just two examples of why WAN optimization is still needed even in the face of the low cost internet bandwidth available.
• The same article says the way WAN optimization is changing, but its functionality is still necessary.

WAN Optimization CAN INTEGRATE cloud storage:

• Business Wire research states WAN is an integral part of cloud computing and cloud storage.
• The growing adoption of cloud storage services made WAN optimization evolve into products that now support data and applications on clouds.
• Many service providers now enable companies to run their whole infrastructure in the cloud.
• As examples, it is possible to point to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and VMWare, among others.
• WAN optimization can accelerate the cloud infrastructure provided by the companies mentioned above.

WAN OPTIMIZATION IS STILL A GROWING MARKET

• Recent research shows the global market for WAN Optimization solutions is going to reach $1.7 billion by 2024. It is still growing market and United States represents the largest market worldwide. (source 6)
• Other research establishes the relevancy of WAN Optimization, because "WAN optimization helps speed up the data transfer process by eliminating duplication of data and it also protects from cyber threats, which otherwise can interrupt IT workflow."
• The WAN optimization global market has projected 18 percent CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) from 2018 to 2025.

Research Strategy