The ability to manage a hybrid business network effectively, ensure that all the applications and processes have the correct connectivity and control all the policies and permissions from a single platform is necessary for the digital transformation of businesses, says application performance company Riverbed Technology Middle East and Africa regional VP Taj Elkhayat.

Digital businesses need responsive and flexible networks and connectivity to manage the data traffic of a wide range of internal and external business uses. This control of all the elements of complex hybrid networks, which are common in many companies, requires visibility of the network elements.

Network performance management solutions, such as the Riverbed SteelConnect product suite, are based on network-function virtualisation (NFV), which provides the means to control the performance of the network based on the priority of the traffic or application in question in a hybrid network environment.

However, this visibility and control enable much faster identification of errors or capacity problems and subsequent management and resolution of these issues.

“Visibility of the entire network [enables] companies to assess whether their networks meet their strategic needs and are able to support their changing business needs as they transition to fully fledged digital enterprises.”

Riverbed has specialised in wide-area network optimisation for 14 years but, over the past few years, has changed to leverage its network management capabilities in partnership with other companies in the enterprise network and information technology ecosystem, says Elkhayat.

“I encourage our channel partners to form close working relationships with the major system integrators and software vendors – even those competing with us – to ensure that the end customer is able to get value from the systems and achieve the associated network performance required to support their use. By proving the worth and value of systems for customers over the long term, we sustain and grow the demand for our services and expertise.”

The aim of its partner strategy is to ensure that the mixed network systems and devices of many vendors and manufacturers in place in companies can be unified onto a single platform from where its performance and problem solving can be done.

Specifically, Riverbed will aim to grow its presence in the telecommunications industry, which stands to benefit from the ability to unify and effectively leverage the existing different-generation telecommunications networks to support modern business uses.

The company has also seen significant and sustained demand from retail companies and logistics operations, which want to ensure that individual sites can use any technology vendor or service provider, but that the parent company retains control over data, business system and security protocols.

“However, we serve and are relevant in all industries. We expect to achieve double-digit growth again over the next year. We are strengthening our relationships with system integration, networking and software companies to ensure that we are able to provide the performance and value required by customers, as it is integral for their transition to digital enterprises.”

The company has acquired end-user experience monitoring company Aternity. Aternity’s addition means that every device – physical, virtual and mobile – can be transformed into a self-monitoring platform that is user-experience aware. Enterprises can then proactively manage the performance of any process on any device to maintain the experience required by the user to do the work effectively and efficiently, concludes Elkhayat.