Well hello old friend, it has certainly been been a while! The second half of last year saw quite a few changes, both personally and professionally. Not only am I a married man now, I also made the move to Riverbed at the end of 2016.
Since I joined, I’ve often been asked: “Why did you join Riverbed?”.
Most people in the IT industry know Riverbed as a company that improves application performance, something it does really well. Even in this day and age, where WAN links are getting faster and cheaper every year, there still is a time and place for application and WAN optimisation. Upgrading a WAN might alleviate some of the capacity problems, but as my colleague JP Baillon has written up, it doesn’t help with improving latency which often is the true enemy of user experience and application performance.
So while application performance optimisation is still very relevant, it’s probably not the sexiest thing in IT. What IS sexy nowadays (ok, for a geek like me) is SD-WAN and if you’ve been following my blog posts, you know I’m a fan of automating things, either at work or at home. Especially if it helps to save money or makes one’s life easier.
The promise of a _software-defined Wide Area Network _is a very attractive one, where new branch sites are automatically configured within minutes through zero-touch provisioning and managed and deployed via the cloud, without having to touch any CLI.
Want automatic per-application or per-user traffic steering, perhaps based on path metrics? No problem. Same goes for seamless integration with Azure and/or AWS, which can be done with just one click.
As for tech, that’s what got me excited about joining Riverbed, with exciting times ahead for the IT industry as a whole with various vendors providing solutions in this area.
Stay tuned for some more technical blog posts by moi on Riverbed’s SD-WAN solution (SteelConnect) shortly. If you’re a fan of live webinars, SDxCentral is hosting a SteelConnect Demo Friday on June 9 @ 10am PDT.