Riverbed Acquisition Of Ocedo Opens 'Enormous' Service Opportunity For Channel
Riverbed Technology's acquisition of software-defined networking specialist Ocedo is going to drive net new services for channel partners, with combined technologies set to launch in the near future, according to Riverbed.
"This is excellent news for our partners to build out a complete suite of services around," said Karl Meulema, senior vice president of global channels at San Francisco-based vendor Riverbed, in an interview with CRN. "There's a massive shift towards [software-defined] WAN. There's an enormous service opportunity there for our partners to help guide their customers through that transition. … As these products evolve further, building out SD-WAN as a service is just one of the many service examples that we foresee in the very near future."
Privately held Karlsruhe, Germany-based Ocedo is a provider of SDN and SD-WAN solutions. Ocedo's solutions will accelerate and expand the presence of Riverbed, an application performance specialist, in the emerging software-defined markets, Riverbed said.
"SD-WAN is a really hot space in the market and it's great to see Riverbed made this acquisition," said Richard Jones, director of strategy at Teneo, a Reading, U.K.-based solution provider and longtime Riverbed partner. "It's really good news for a partner like us because we understand applications performance management, which is the foundation that allows you to make informed decisions about your SD-WAN strategy."
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Research firm Gartner, Stamford, Conn., said it expects the SD-WAN market to grow significantly over the next three years in the enterprise. By 2019, 30 percent of enterprises will use SD-WAN products in all their branch offices, up from less than 1 percent in 2015, according to Gartner.
Riverbed said the acquisition puts it among the leaders in SDN and SD-WAN solutions.
With the rise of cloud applications and hybrid WANs, Riverbed partners have consultative opportunities to help customers navigate through the transition, said Josh Dobies, senior director of product marketing at Riverbed.
"There's going to be a lot of upfront services that will be really important for our partners to create as they help their customers make this transition," said Dobies. "This acquisition further expands our portfolio our partners can leverage to create a holistic solution for delivering application performance to the edge with ease."
The two companies already have complementary technology in the software-defined markets, according to Dobies.
"We'll be taking [Ocedo] core intellectual property and adding to it some of the innovations from Riverbed -- specifically around our ability to identify applications with ease, our deep packet inspection engine, our ability to do path selection across hybrid WAN networks and advanced network QoS," said Dobies, in an interview with CRN.
"So we're going to be adding that on top of their software to run on their hardware -- that's what we're going to be launching to bring to the market toward the end of this current quarter," said Dobies.
Teneo's Jones said he's seeing an increase in SDN adoption by customers, and any partner who sells "next generation" technologies should see more professional services become available in 2016.
"It's only more recently that we've been seeing customers move from the stage where they're considering it, to really starting to move ahead with those projects," said Jones. "It's still next generation, emerging technology, but that's what we're all about. … We're really happy to see that Riverbed's made another step to fund their commitment towards SD-WAN."
PUBLISHED JAN. 19, 2016