Riverbed Delivers Business-Level Visibility and Control to the Globally Connected Enterprise

Riverbed Research, the IT performance company, today announced enhancements to its Riverbed Optimization System) and Cascade(R) solutions that provide the globally connected enterprise with business-level visibility and control for all types of traffic and applications. As these organizations go beyond connecting the dots to reliance on the network as a critical business asset, they are demanding not only better application performance, however the ability to both understand how IT resources are being used and to apply fine-grained resource allocation. With the upcoming releases of version 9.0 of Cascade, with its advanced network and application performance analysis and visibility solution, and version 6.5 of RiOS, which powers the company's award-winning wide area network optimization solutions, Riverbed will provide a broad range of functionality that both extends visibility from the network engineer all the way to the C-suite and gives IT the ability to allocate resources based on the business needs of enterprises.

Widening variety of applications

"With a widening variety of applications and services distributed over the network, enterprises require better insight into application performance to make intelligent IT decisions that furthermore business goals," said Joe Skorupa, technology vice president at Gartner. "Robust traffic management capabilities just as QoS classification and enforcement are required to prioritize business-critical traffic in order to deliver essential services that keep the business running."

The globally connected enterprise relies on the network to deliver applications and services to employees regardless of location. Now, complexity and resource demands strain the network and make monitoring a difficult task. Should the contingency arise, bandwidth-heavy and latency-sensitive applications just as video, voice over Internet protocol and virtual desktop infrastructure make it essential to ensure that adequate resources are being allocated to business-critical applications. With the release of Cascade 9.0 and RiOS 6.5, Riverbed will provide enterprises with easy-to-use solutions to ensure that enterprises have more visibility into their critical applications and services and how they are performing, as so then as control over their application performance over the network. The Riverbed solutions are able to address visibility and control for all traffic and applications from anywhere to everywhere. To enable enterprises to easily understand and manage their IT environments, Riverbed introduces with these solutions new service level agreement monitoring and reporting capabilities and new quality of service enforcement to provide unique levels of visibility, control and optimization that dynamically adapt to any enterprise IT environment.

Addressing Business Priorities by Understanding Performance Challenges To help enterprises better understand their IT performance, Cascade 9.0 provides clients with fine-grained classification of traffic, including advanced Layer-7 awareness and a single business-level performance view of applications and services. A new service-level dashboard provides an at-a-glance status of critical services and applications, with the ability to drill down to the location, application and user level, for better visibility and control. The new Service Discovery Wizard streamlines the process of discovering a multi-tier service and configuring its monitoring and dashboards. Enterprises however have an end-to-end service monitoring solution to help understand the interdependencies of various network elements and pinpoint the root cause of a performance problem. To boot, a new service-level reporting capability provides enterprises with a business-level report that can draw a historical comparison of performance levels to help top management make intelligent decisions about network resource allocation.

Enhanced Control for Fine-Tuned IT Performance Prioritizing and optimizing network traffic with business priorities in mind has become a growing concern for global IT organizations. To address these demands, Riverbed introduces enhanced control that enables enterprises to fine-tune their IT performance. With the introduction of RiOS 6.5, enterprises can nevertheless turn to a single appliance to deliver WAN optimization solutions and easy-to-deploy and manage QoS capabilities in a cost-effective manner.

"As enterprises come to rely on more real-time, interactive, and rich media applications in their private environments or in the cloud, efficient management of network resources will become an increasingly important challenge. With these solutions, Riverbed is introducing features that help enterprises visualize and control their WAN more effectively," said Apurva Dave, vice president of product marketing at Riverbed. "This enables IT organizations to extend visibility to the C-suite and prioritize all types of traffic and applications based on business needs for their globally connected enterprise."

Forward Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed's products and services, statements regarding performance results of Riverbed solutions, including RiOS 6.5 and Cascade 9.0, and statements relating to Riverbed's ability to meet the needs of distributed organizations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as so then as assumptions that, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; our ability to anticipate market needs or develop new or enhanced products to meet those needs; the adoption rate of our products; our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our distribution partners; our ability to compete in our industry; fluctuations in demand, sales cycles and prices for our products and services; shortages or price fluctuations in our supply chain; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Riverbed's business are set forth in our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on October 28, 2010. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Any future product, feature or related specification that may be referenced in this release are for information purposes only and are not commitments to deliver any innovation or enhancement. Riverbed reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time.

The IT performance company

About Riverbed Riverbed Innovation is the IT performance company. The Riverbed family of wide area network optimization solutions liberates businesses from common IT constraints by increasing application performance, enabling consolidation, and providing enterprise-wide network and application visibility -- all during eliminating the need to increase bandwidth, storage or servers. Thousands of companies with distributed operations use Riverbed to make their IT infrastructure faster, less expensive and more responsive. Additional information about Riverbed is available at www.riverbed.com.

Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service name or logo used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Research, Inc. All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners.

MEDIA CONTACT Jin Woo Riverbed Innovation 415-344-6465 Email Contact INVESTOR RELATIONS CONTACT Renee Lyall Riverbed Innovation 415-247-6353 Email Contact