 Joining me now is Venugopal Pai, who is VP of Global Alliances with Riverbed. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Stu, and we're glad to be here. Thanks, great, so as I said, we're talking at a storage conference here, but cloud computing and virtualization are obviously huge pieces of what are going on, so can you tell us a little bit about how Riverbed fits into the ecosystem? Absolutely, thanks Stu. So Riverbed, as a company, has been focused on helping customers to start infrastructure, pull data from branch offices into their private cloud. So we've been doing it for quite a few years. What used to be a consolidation is now building a private cloud. So a lot of our customers, over the last few years, in order to save money and to really build efficiency, have now consolidated into the data center. We've helped them move and transition them into that format. As customers are transitioning into the cloud, into whether it's a private cloud or a public cloud or a hybrid cloud, the network tends to be an increasingly important piece because now you're sending more data over both the public internet and your private internet and we tend to become some of the key enablers of customers making that transition into the cloud. Yeah, so I think back, I first know of Riverbed as really kind of WAN technology, replication type solutions, and as the massive amounts of data keep growing and bandwidth is growing, but not typically not quite as fast as the data is growing. So, how are things really changing in kind of the WAN space and what you're doing for cloud computing versus that traditional replication? Absolutely, so from a WAN perspective, if you look at all the data not traversing the WAN, whether you're coming over a mobile device, whether you're from a branch office, or whether you're coming from enterprise data center, irrespective of that, anytime you leave your office, the data's going over a WAN link, right? And as customers are getting more global, the data now tends to be decentralized from an access perspective, but centralized from a CIO perspective. And so the quagmire is how do you now breach the two gaps in terms of delivering performance for users irrespective of where they are, but still allow customers to enable consolidation from a cloud computing perspective. And so WAN optimization has evolved from being a branch office play, but become increasingly more relevant when people talk about cloud is because now the disparity of distance and latency becomes more of a factor, both from a performance perspective and from a bandwidth perspective. So as you're now pushing more data down a single link, you have a choice of upgrading bandwidth because you're not pushing more data down or using WAN optimization to minimize the impact of bandwidth on the applications and minimize the impact of latency on performance of these applications from a cloud computing perspective. Okay, so when I listened to EMC talking about cloud, last year was all about the journey to the private cloud. This year it seems to be hybrid cloud and also we have more of the public cloud offerings. So where does Riverbid fit for kind of the hybrid and the public cloud? I saw that you had a partnership with Atmos. Which piece of the cloud do you fit into? Absolutely, so from a product perspective, we've made significant forays into evolving our product both from a virtualization perspective and from a public hybrid cloud perspective. So a couple of things come to mind. We launched a product called Whitewater because as customers start flowing into looking at taking advantage of cloud storage from a public cloud perspective, we've enabled our Whitewater product to write to the EMC Atmos platform. So by writing to the rest API at the back end, we're able to help customers take the backup software, bake a backup stream and send it automatically into the EMC Atmos cloud today delivered by AT&T, for example. So that's a clear leverage of how we are taking our technology and helping customers migrate to a cloud-based architecture. The second thing we've done is we made an announcement today with Akamai. So as customers look at enabling the hybrid cloud, when they're now sending data what used to be just over the private internet, but now going to the public internet for a SaaS-based application or a data center that is now managed by a service provider, they actually, the public internet now maybe impays the performance or they need to now address the performance issues going to the public internet. So the partners with Akamai is to enable the hybrid cloud where a riverbed will address a lot of the performance and latency issue that comes with ban optimization. And Akamai as a partner brings in a lot of the networking resiliency and network intelligence they bring in from the CDN technology. So the partnership is really to help customers take advantage of moving to hybrid cloud architecture. So, Pai, you talked a little bit about partnerships there. I'm curious, how do you find yourself going to market these days? If I remember correct, you're an EMC select partner. That's correct. They're service providers. I mean, who do you find people buying from? Who's the trusted advisor? And how much are you selling direct versus going through partners or being bundled into the solution? So we've always been a channel-based company. So we've always sold through partners. So that's been the DNA of our company right from the beginning of the beginning. So over 95% of our business goes through channel partners, right? And as the business has grown from 2004, we're a $2 million company. We closed last year. We closed for $552 million in revenue. So we've grown dramatically and so our partner model has matured as well. So over the last couple of years, service providers have become an increasingly important channel for us in terms of delivering products, both as a channel and as a managed service. So a lot of service providers deliver a riverbed, both as part of customers buying, networking as a service provider, and buying bandwidth with WAN optimization. EMC has become a partner for the last two and a half years. We're an EMC select partner and we announced today where EMC typically were selling only three of our entire product portfolio, which at the high end was focused on high end replication. What we announced today is now EMC has the access to our entire product line, both for WAN optimization, for branch office consolidation, and for replication. So the EMC partnership continues to evolve and continues to mature besides doing some very unique technology things, unique and specific for EMC protocols. Great, so how does Riverbed find themselves differentiating against just having your functionality be a feature built into general networking products or the other WAN optimizations? As you said, if you're all through the channel, how do you keep your brand? How do you get known and where do you find yourself differentiating yourself? Absolutely, so from a market share perspective, we've had the luxury of having, we have a 44% market share, right? So that continues to grow on a year by year basis. So that really creates a brand and awareness of who Riverbed is in terms of a market leadership from a technology perspective. What we've done from an EMC partnership is really, we're not just about networking at layer two, layer three, we focus on layer four through seven, right? Really bring application level awareness to protocols. So for example, with EMC, we worked at the EMC SRDFA engineering team for quite a few years. So what we've done is not just look at it as a protocol, but really understand how the protocol works. So for example, if you're using SRDFA, we can automatically turn off compression, optimize the traffic across, and turn on compression to the other side. So from an EMC perspective, there's nothing you have to do to enable or disable compression. At the SRDFA, RDF groups, we're actually able to prioritize different groups so that you can choose which traffic is most important to you. So we're really bringing network intelligence to storage and trying to bring storage intelligence into the network to bring conversion networking, both for cloud and for enterprise customers. Great, so when I think about all the different pieces that make up the network, management and security are really the top two challenges people talk about when they talk about cloud computing. So how does Riverbed help solve that issue? So from a management perspective, we have customers that have over a thousand appliances in a single network, right? And many of them now have the onus of managing these different applications, managing these appliances, be it software or hardware. So we have the central management console that is able to manage all of these instances of a software and be able to upload or download new versions of the software. On the other hand, we also integrate with high-level management platforms, be it an EMC smart, be it an HP OpenView or a Tivoli Netcool. So vCenter? And vCenter as well. So vCenter, one of the things we have is we have the ability to run virtual VMware inside our appliances for the branch office, right? So today, we're able to now enable customers to now manage all of those instances using VMware technology. Okay, great. Yeah, so when you look at this year, what's the big objective for Riverbed from an alliance standpoint, partnerships? What are the big shows you're going at? What messages are you trying to get across? So great question. So this week is a big, big for Riverbed because today we have EMC world down here as well as interop. So both are very big for Riverbed. So from an alliance perspective, EMC is a very important partner of ours. Microsoft TechEd is the following week. So we continue to invest in Microsoft technology because customers use us to optimize Microsoft applications. SAP is a partner. And so we continue to look at applications and application optimization, both from applications as an enterprise application, storage traffic with EMC and all the different EMC forums we attend. And also as cloud events come into play, all the cloud computing events that we attend with. So if you look at interop, cloud computing is a big, big factor of that. So the announcement with Akamai, the EMC partnership around cloud and white water are all big, big forays into how we can help customers make the transition. Yeah. Have you been over to interop yet? Not yet. That's my plan this evening. So I'm going tomorrow and I'm curious, have you had a chance to kind of look at, what do you think of EMC's cloud messaging versus the industry as a whole? I think EMC's cloud messaging is right on point in terms of how customers are now looking at consolidation and trying to centralize all the content from a CI to save money. And what we do to help customers make the transition is very complementary in terms of our EMC partnership, right? So as EMC makes and helps the customers move to a cloud-based architecture, our technology in helping customers make the transition, enabling them at a global level to centralize, consolidate and virtualize the architecture from right from the branch office all the way into the data center is a very, very sound approach that we think EMC will be doing great with. So I'm curious, for those of us that have been in the industry for a while and especially working on WAN and networking, how much of this is kind of evolutionary from what we've been doing for the last few years versus really transformational? I mean, cloud is supposed to be the next big wave like the internet. How much of that is reality versus, what's the opportunity here? So we are seeing customers in varying factors. A lot of enterprises that we talk to are definitely making a transition and putting in blueprints and architectures and frameworks on how they could make that transition. Obviously, there's a lot of questions they ask about security and compliance and data replication and things like that. So all those questions we continue to address, but we're seeing customers definitely making a strong move into taking advantage of cloud, be it private or public. So with private clouds about consolidation, virtualization, elastic computing, public cloud is how can I now build efficiency with public applications? For example, software as a service or platforms as a service. With our products like Whitewall, with our products, virtual stealer, cloud stealer technology, as customers make the transition, we want to make sure that WAN doesn't tend to be a limiting factor in making that transition into cloud computing. And excellent. So here at the show, is Riverbed giving presentations? Are you part of any of the labs that are going on? Or how do people find out more about your product? So we actually have two presentations today, one at 1245 down at the Solutions Center on IMC Select, and then one at the Solutions Theater. So we have two presentations, one at three o'clock and one at noon. So I hope everybody that is listening can come down and listen to more of what we have to say. Excellent. And I see Riverbed.com's your website if people are trying to find. Yes, so Riverbed.com has a lot of the latest information as well as all the products that we talked about here. Okay, great. So I think we're about wrapping up on this segment. Pai, I really appreciate you coming into theCUBE, learning about how, you know, networking's going into cloud computing, service providers, good partnership, growing with EMC, all the different channels there. So thanks so much for joining us. Thank you Stu for the opportunity.