Riverbed Launches MSP Program As Company Revamps Overall Channel Approach

Riverbed Channel Chief Alex Thurber is putting his stamp on the company’s global channel with a new program geared toward MSPs serving midmarket customers as the company grows its unified observability and digital experience business, Alluvio.

Alex Thurber, senior vice president, global partners and alliances for Riverbed

Riverbed has launched a new channel program geared toward MSPs targeting the mid-market, a new demographic for the longtime enterprise-focused company.

The Riverbed Alluvio Commercial Exclusive, or ACE program, introduced on Monday, targets MSP partners serving SMBs and new customers to Alluvio Aternity Digital Experience Management (DEM) as Riverbed looks to scale its unified observability and digital experience business.

Alex Thurber, senior vice president, global partners and alliances for Riverbed who has been at the helm for just over a year, told CRN that the ACE program is just the start of a renovation of the overall Riverbed Rise partner program.

“We will have a very different partner environment next year than we do today,” Thurber said.

[Related: Riverbed Launches First Cloud Service As Part Of Unified Observability Push]

Riverbed in 2022 revealed its two core brands: Riverbed Acceleration and Alluvio by Riverbed, which reflects the company’s heavy focus and investment in unified observability to bring together network and application data and insights for enterprises and channel partners.

Alluvio Aternity DEM combines IT service benchmarking, end user experience monitoring, application performance monitoring and device performance monitoring. The offering can provide a view into business-critical applications and measure end user experience, according to the San Francisco-based provider.

“As a company, we’re very focused on that Fortune 2,000 company — the largest companies in the world. What we realized is that there are opportunities for Aternity in that next level of company — that commercial marketplace — they can really get some gains and advantages by the technology itself, both from the cost savings, as well as the experience management piece, but we’re not designed to sell into that market,” Thurber said.

It was the impetus for the company to develop the ACE program for MSP partners that could take Aternity to their SMB customers and help Riverbed expand that side of the business, Thurber said. “[The midmarket] is the perfect market segment for scale,” he said.

Aternity DEM will go 100 percent through the channel. “It’s really the first time Riverbed looked at expanding its potential market opportunity. I think that’s great for the company, great for the partner community, and ultimately great for the customers because a next generation of customers will get access to the advantages of Aternity,” he said.

The global total addressable market for observability in the midmarket space is well over $200 million, and that’s only with a 10 percent market penetration, Thurber said.

The channel chief said that the ACE program has launched first in Europe and will quickly move to North America. From there, the program could fit naturally into the Latin America and Asia markets for commercial customers in those geographies, Thurber said. The company is kicking off the initially invitation-only program by integrating some of its longtime partners into ACE that have their own MSP and professional services businesses.