A lot of players on the river.

Implications: 1) The waters are heating up with old and new competitors.

2) Will continue to grow in the next three quarters - and then....


Analysis: 1) The waters are heating up with old and new competitors.

Their stake in the ground with Wide Are File Services (WAFS) has been impressive.  Riverbed's Steelhead -  wide-area data services (WDS) has had success in many verticals.  We have enjoyed the competition they have added.  They address the issues of latency head on with:
NFS caching/acceleration, CIFS caching/acceleration, MAPI acceleration, MS RPC optimization coupled with a number of other tools.   Performance testing, reliability, client support as well as partner support have been very good.  Key variables for us when embracing a vendor.  But lets look at the other players that muddy the waters for Riverbed and certainly make the waters tough to navigate.  F5's Wanjet, Cisco WAAS and ISR, Bluecoat Proxy GS, Juniper's WX and WXC, Packeter's Ishared are all on the same river AND many of the larger vendors add WOC and AFE functionality as well.  Riverbed has deserved their accolades but they can not afford to make any mistakes navigating these waters.

2) Will continue to grow in the next three quarters - and then....

Riverbed has vision.  They are talking about WAN optimization software for individual PCs.  Their strategy is to have a holistic offering to clients but their rivals are well established, many have a large established client base and some have stronger established relationships with the large application companies. 

The application acceleration business is growing at a faster rate than many other core infrastructure technologies.  Annual growth for many is in the 20% to 30% range.   Going forward, the ADC sector not including the Layer 4-7 load balancing switch market is likely to fold in WOC functionality.  In the next three quarters, Riverbed needs to be sensitive to players such as Cisco and Juniper that have the ability to fold in greater WAFS functionality into present and future switches and  branch routers.