Some folks who work in IT have summed up the field as a search-and-destroy mission against bottlenecks, wherever they may be at the moment. Cutting-edge innovation is forever butting up against some older system that is not equal in speed or efficiency. Developers and investors know that whoever is first to break the choke point can expect big returns. One company thinks that the IT bottleneck is now in the network, and its synergy of technologies has the mojo to break through.

Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, spoke about Riverbed Technology Inc.’s new turn as a private company and its networking attack plan. During the Riverbed Disrupt event, Vellante recounted the company’s previous foray into diversifying and acquiring, saying, “Wall Street didn’t like that, and they ended up going private, but they had a $3 billion-plus evaluation — extremely successful company.”

Vellante explained that, like many companies who switch from public to private, Riverbed is now in the process of retooling and repositioning itself in the market. He said that the bottleneck in IT has moved from storage to networking, and disruption and innovation in this area will continue to heat up.

Networking Rubik’s Cube

Miniman explained that demand for application visibility on an end-to-end spectrum and software at the edge is driving networking innovation.

“I shouldn’t have to worry about where my data is and where my people are, and of course that requires a lot of complexity and a lot of moving pieces on the network. And Riverbed feels they’re in the best location to solve that problem,” he said.

Riverbed’s family of solutions under the Steel rubric — SteelHead, SteelConnect, and SteelFusion, among others — combine to solve these issues.

Can SD-WAN break the bottleneck?

Riverbed has had striking success competing with Cisco on the networking front, now commanding over 50 percent of the market share, explained Vellante.

Miniman said that Riverbed has all the pieces needed to attack the new networking challenge. “This whole transformation from WAN optimization to SD [sotware-defined] WAN is something I’m excited to dig into with the practitioners and Riverbed partners here throughout the day,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Riverbed Disrupt.

Photo by SiliconANGLE