News

posted on 20 April 2008 18:53

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It sounds too amazing to be true but Riverbed is claiming to win nine times out of ten against Cisco and Juniper when selling its Steelhead wide area network (WAN) acceleration product.

It had an independent marketing firm, King Research, survey more than 828 customers and resellers, representing 506 organizations of every size world-wide, for its semi-annual customer survey.

Cisco competed for the business in 40 percent of the customers and Juniper in 23 percent. King Research found that Riverbed maintained a 90 percent win rate against its competitors.

What we can't know for sure is how many Cisco and Juniper customers there were where Cisco and Juniper won against Riverbed. Riverbed supplied customer names to King Research and not Cisco and Juniper. So the results ought to be biased in favour of Riverbed wins.

Riverbed might, for example, have a 30 percent share of the WAN acceleration market and in that share could maintain a 90 percent win rate. Outside that share it maintains a zero percent win rate, meaning that Cisco might actually have a better win rate overall than Riverbed.

We don't know that but equally we don't know what Riverbed's true win rate is in all the bids it features in. Perhaps a ninety percent win rate is too amazing to be true.

The top ten applications that customers are accelerating with Riverbed products were found to be:

1. Windows File Sharing

2. Microsoft Exchange

3. Web-based applications (e.g., SharePoint, Web Front)

4. MS-SQL back-end applications

5. Custom applications

6. Client/server business applications (e.g., Oracle, SAP)

7. FTP

8. Backup/replication (e.g., SnapMirror, DPM, DoubleTake)

9. Thin client

10. CAD and document management (e.g., Interwoven, Documentum).

Almost 90 percent of the organisations surveyed said that they would recommend Riverbed to others.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}