Riverbed Unveils Alluvio Brand To House Unified Observability Business

‘We’re solving a lot of problems that people were having to cobble together multiple vendors and point products to solve. … No one else has been able to look at network, application or end user and pull that data in together,’ Riverbed CEO Dan Smoot tells CRN about the company’s new Alluvio by Riverbed brand.

Riverbed is making good on its promise to disrupt the market and reclaim its position as a tech leader in the observability arena, Riverbed CEO Dan Smoot (pictured) told CRN.

The San Francisco-based company Wednesday revealed its two core brands: Riverbed Acceleration and a new brand identity, Alluvio by Riverbed, which reflects the company’s heavy focus and investment in unified observability over the past year.

“The next piece of our journey is actually bringing the unified observability portfolio under this new brand called Alluvio, which really is a disruptive structure where we take all of the capabilities that we’re doing in network application and end user and aggregating that data into a new, contextualized, correlated platform, where you can take those assets and actually do something that the market has not yet seen,” Smoot said.

[Related: Riverbed CEO Focused On ‘Disruption’ In Network Observability Space In 2022]

Riverbed in February told CRN it was cleaning up its branding to make its products and offerings clearer to partners and end customers. The company’s two focused, but separate product areas were its WAN optimization and acceleration and network performance monitoring (NPM) products, and its Aternity products for End-User Experience Management (EUEM) and observability that it gained in 2016 via acquisition.

The Alluvio by Riverbed portfolio includes Riverbed’s NPM products, IT Infrastructure Monitoring (ITIM) and Digital Experience Management (DEM), application performance management (APM) and Aternity EUEM software offerings that are available today and in use by thousands of enterprises, the company said.

“We really will have that end-to-end visibility piece. It’s that whole idea of unified observability—digital endpoint, all the way down to the server side, which is, I think, really one of the things that stands out for us at Riverbed, just being able to provide that level of visibility across the flows of the data,” said Riverbed Senior Vice President of Global Partners and Alliances Alex Thurber, who joined the company in February.

Smoot promised disruption and specific branding around its unified observability business this year. The Alluvio brand is helping the company refresh its strategy and present the increasingly compelling opportunity around observability to its channel partners.

Riverbed has seen more than 30 percent year-over-year bookings growth in its visibility and observability solutions in the last three quarters, including its most recent fiscal quarter. Hybrid work and networks, multi-cloud environments, and modern application architectures are driving this growth, the company said.

Unfortunately, the same trends are making it harder for IT teams to pull insight from their data and proactively manage performance using their existing tools, Smoot said.

Many observability tools in the market today limit or sample data for IT teams, leaving out some user, network and application data that IT could use for troubleshooting problems within increasingly distributed infrastructures. Alluvio, Riverbed’s unified observability software arm, will give IT teams and solution providers a unified view and data that can be used to make decisions or inject automation into hybrid environments, the company said.

“We’re solving a lot of problems that people were having to cobble together multiple vendors and point products to solve. They are seeing us as a single source for a very complex problem, which is how an infrastructure is really performing from cloud, to hybrid, to end user and customer experience,” Smoot said. “No one else has been able to look at network, application or end user and pull that data in together. That’s what makes this so unique.”

Partners can use the Alluvio portfolio to not only help customers identify issues, but also fix problems, Thurber said. “That’s the exciting part for partners,” he added.

Riverbed does about 90 percent of its business through the channel.

The name “Alluvio” comes from the word alluvium, the place where riverbeds unite and form a space that can be mined for gold or, in Riverbed’s case, data. The “o” in Alluvio stands for observability, the company said.