WAN Optimization Solution Delivers Expanded Coverage for Virtual Desktop Environments; Dramatically Improves Application Performance and Response Times

Riverbed Technology , the IT performance company, has announced that its award-winning Riverbed® Steelhead® wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions now provide enhanced support for Citrix XenDesktop virtual desktop solutions. With this announcement, Riverbed builds on its industry-leading abilities to accelerate and control the broadest range of virtual desktop environments over the WAN. Customers that deploy Steelhead products in a virtual desktop environment are able to overcome the WAN performance issues that bottleneck the most popular virtual desktop deployments, significantly enhancing virtual desktop end-user productivity and better enabling the adoption of virtual desktop infrastructure.

Many organizations are turning to desktop virtualization to centralize critical data and deliver IT resources more efficiently. However, WAN constraints such as latency, limited bandwidth, and an inability to prioritize interactive traffic can cause virtual desktop performance to slow to a crawl, causing noticeable delays in mouse movements and keyboard inputs. As a result, user productivity suffers. The Riverbed Steelhead product family helps organizations get the most out of their virtual desktop deployments by optimizing traffic for a full range of solutions, including Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop, VMware View, and Microsoft RDP and RemoteFX, enabling Riverbed customers to overcome the performance barriers to delivering desktop virtualization over the WAN.

“Steelhead solutions now optimize an even wider array of virtual desktop traffic from the major virtual desktop infrastructure providers – Citrix, VMware and Microsoft – while continuing to provide customers with superior performance for all of the applications they rely upon to do business,” said Apurva Davé, vice president of product marketing at Riverbed. “Riverbed gives customers the flexibility to choose the virtual desktop infrastructure platform that fits their needs and allows them to feel confident that they will benefit from the proven performance benefits provided by our market-leading acceleration solutions.”

Enhanced Optimization for Citrix Virtual Desktop Environments
Riverbed now delivers enhanced optimization for Citrix XenDesktop in addition to the optimization that it already delivers for XenApp, offering up to 60 percent bandwidth reduction for Citrix ICA traffic when compared to uncompressed Citrix traffic, ensuring that customers can support more virtual desktop users without incurring additional bandwidth costs. The Riverbed solution also offers simplified configuration for Citrix optimizations, enabling customers to easily deploy and manage accelerated Citrix environments. Additionally, the fine-grained QoS controls available in the Riverbed Steelhead appliance enable customers to control virtual desktop streams and prioritize latency-sensitive traffic without overprovisioning bandwidth, which allows organizations to successfully deploy virtual desktops without adding bandwidth or impacting the performance of other applications running on the network. This also helps ensure that virtual desktop traffic and native application traffic can successfully co-exist in accordance with business priorities.

More than 9,200 organizations worldwide, across a wide range of markets, depend on Riverbed to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT infrastructure. Riverbed delivers appliance-based and virtualized solutions that overcome performance issues caused by distance, distributed computing, and ever increasing amounts of data. Virtualization, consolidation and cloud computing promise huge cost savings and improved efficiencies, but as users move farther from their data, slow applications and file transfers can stall these strategic initiatives. Riverbed delivers to the remote office and mobile workers the same “local area network (LAN)-like” performance, no matter where the private data center or public cloud may be.

For additional information on Riverbed desktop virtualization solutions, please visit www.riverbed.com.

Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed’s products and services, statements regarding the growth characteristics of, and customer demand relating to, the VDI market, statements regarding performance results of Riverbed solutions and customer cost savings following implementation of Riverbed solutions that may suggest likely or certain outcomes, and statements relating to Riverbed’s ability to meet the needs of distributed organizations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; our ability to anticipate market needs or develop new or enhanced products to meet those needs; the adoption rate of our products; our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our distribution partners; our ability to compete in our industry; fluctuations in demand, sales cycles and prices for our products and services; shortages or price fluctuations in our supply chain; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Riverbed’s business are set forth in our Form 10-K filed with the SEC on February 8, 2011. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Any future product, feature or related specification that may be referenced in this release are for information purposes only and are not commitments to deliver any technology or enhancement. Riverbed reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time.

About Riverbed
Riverbed delivers performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and intelligently implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performance. By giving enterprises the platform they need to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns with the business needs of the organization. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com.

Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service name or logo used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc.  All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners.