16 May 2017

Riverbed CEO Jerry M. Kennelly believes a fundamental rethink is required to deal with today’s “complex and unpredictable” networks.

Riverbed Technology has signed a definitive agreement to buy Xirrus in a move that will create what’s claimed to be the world’s first SD-WAN solution that covers the network from core to the edge. The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Riverbed says the acquisition will expand its SteelConnect SD-WAN and cloud networking platform with the integration of a “proven” suite of high density and cloud-managed Wi-Fi solutions. 

It claims this will offer customers and partners the “power” of unified connectivity and policy-based orchestration that spans the entire distributed network – WAN, LAN/WLAN, data centre and the cloud. Riverbed will also continue to offer Xirrus as a stand-alone enterprise WLAN solution.

“In today’s digital, cloud and mobile world, enterprise networks are more complex and unpredictable than ever before, and IT is struggling to manage all of this,” says Riverbed chairman and CEO Jerry M. Kennelly. “A fundamental rethink to networking is required, and with this acquisition Riverbed and our partners are uniquely positioned to provide CIOs and businesses with a software-defined networking approach that delivers unified connectivity and orchestration across the entire network.”

Paul O’Farrell, the firm’s SVP of the Riverbed SteelConnect, SteelHead and SteelFusion business unit, adds that legacy approaches to network management have become untenable. He says: “IT must move beyond the days of managing individual network devices using arcane CLI commands and scripts, and instead move to software-defined approaches that are based on global policies, automation and orchestration.”