Riverbed Snags Cisco Veteran For Key Cloud Post

Riverbed in November detailed its strategy for accelerating access to public clouds, announcing a roadmap for new WAN acceleration appliances and cloud-based, virtual iSCSI storage appliances. Chapman will be in charge of driving that strategy.

"Ed was a natural choice, given his almost 20 years of product management experience, storage networking expertise, and demonstrated leadership in developing strong partner ecosystems," said Eric Wolford, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Riverbed, in a statement. "The breadth of Ed's knowledge across multiple markets, including storage, networking and data centers, will complement our product direction as we begin to introduce solutions that extend the benefits of acceleration to storage in the public cloud."

Chapman's most recent role at Cisco was vice president of product management, responsible for data center switching and storage in Cisco's Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit, and also mergers, acquisitions and strategic alliances with other vendors in the space.

Before joining that business unit, Chapman was in charge of Cisco's entire storage networking portfolio, and received Cisco's Pioneer Award for Technical Excellence thanks to his work on the Catalyst 6000 switch.

In a statement, Chapman championed Riverbed's "innovative product development and execution" and said he is "excited by the opportunity to leverage the company's core technology in a way that will change how enterprises and governments think about storage."

"As our cloud storage product vision comes to fruition, Riverbed customers will be able to eliminate the performance issues that occur when adopting private, public and hybrid cloud environments," he said.

In the months since the cloud roadmap was revealed, Riverbed has added not only products, such as new high-end Steelhead WAN appliances, but also strategic partnerships, such as with McAfee and Microsoft.

The company also expanded its worldwide channel program and also introduced two-tier distribution, naming Arrow ECS and Avnet Technology Solutions as distributors.