Riverbed Technology specializes in IT performance. Riverbed provides the only comprehensive WAN optimization solution to a host of severe problems that have effectively prevented enterprises from sharing applications and data across wide areas. Thousands of widely distributed businesses use Riverbed to make their IT infrastructure faster, less expensive and more responsive.


Today's Strategy Matter's interview is with Eric Wolford, the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for Riverbed, where he has worked since 2003. In his current role, Eric drives Riverbed's go to market planning and product line strategy.

During a new podcast, Eric discusses the current state of the cloud computing market, enterprise customers' challenges in the cloud and several new initiatives. In the excerpt below, Eric reviews some of the technological challenges that enterprise customers face, including the cloud's "dirty little secrets."

" There are two or three aspects of cloud computing that are not talked about as frequently. One of those dirty little secrets is that performance and data transfer rates become key issues as the distance between the data and the user increases - which is what happens in cloud computing.

Cloud computing has data that goes from something that was very close to the user to a third-party data center which is usually thousands of miles from that user. As applications become more rich and you try to move a lot of data from one place to other places everywhere in the world, those endpoints that are consuming the mail application, the share point application, the document sharing application, the compute modeling application will experience very poor performance because the data that used to be right next to them or very close to them is now in the cloud thousands of miles away.

As that consolidation takes place, there is a degradation in performance due to latency and the bandwidth requirements that are needed.

So one of the things that we at Riverbed are excited to address and love cloud computing, is because it spotlights the need to overcome those performance problems rooted in latency and bandwidth, and those are problems that we address directly.

Bandwidth is the thing everyone understands. Broadband makes things faster. The dirty little secret is, unlimited bandwidth without solving the latency problem does not make performance any better because the latency - or the chattiness - of the protocols, plus the speed of light limitations cause the end user experience to be very poor."

Click here to register and listen to the complete podcast of this interview with Eric Wolford of Riverbed.

Carl Tsukuhara is a principal of Marketing Arts.