Riverbed Survey on Riverbed

Riverbed Technology announced the results of its semi-annual customer survey conducted in March 2008. King Research, an independent marketing research firm serving technology companies for over thirteen years, conducted field research and provided analysis for the semi-annual customer survey. For the latest spring ’08 survey, 828 customers and resellers responded across five continents, representing 506 organizations of every size. According to the results, customer satisfaction with Riverbed products, technical support and professional services exceeds the industry norm. With more than 87% of the respondents saying that they would recommend Riverbed products and services, the survey results show that Riverbed and its products deliver as promised.  

The semi-annual survey of Riverbed customers takes an objective look at customer satisfaction with Riverbed products, technical support and professional services. It also looks at the applications Riverbed customers are accelerating with Riverbed Steelhead products, as well as customer purchase motivations, other vendors considered in the purchase process and why customers chose Riverbed over the competition.

The data suggests that the competitive landscape remains unchanged. Riverbed’s top two competitors remain Cisco (competing in 40% of customer decisions) and Juniper (competing in 23% of customer decisions). Riverbed continues to maintain a 90% win rate against all of its competitors. Riverbed is well-known in the marketplace as the only vendor to provide a best-of-breed, integrated WDS solution that accelerates applications and data for remote offices, data centers and mobile workers across wide area networks (WANs), accelerating access to applications and data up to 100 times faster.

Customer satisfaction: It is all about going faster
Over 87% of the respondents gave Riverbed an overall company rating of eight or higher on a scale of 1-10, while a full 39% of respondents gave Riverbed a perfect score of 10 out of 10. Product performance, hardware and software quality and management capabilities were all highly rated, with application performance peaking at 8.75 out of 10. The Riverbed technical support team also received exceptional scores, with expertise of support engineers coming in at 8.72 out of 10.

“In the multitude of customer satisfaction studies we have conducted for technology companies over the past thirteen years Riverbed’s customers are among the most enthusiastic. The overall scores reported are some of the highest that we have seen,” said Diane Hagglund, managing director for King Research. “Overall, Riverbed customers are thrilled with the performance, ease of deployment and management of Steelhead products as well as with the knowledge and responsiveness of the company’s global services organization.”

Purchase motivations: speed and cost savings
King Research surveyed the Riverbed customer base to determine their primary and secondary purchase motivations.

• 51% of respondents selected applications and data acceleration
• 48% of respondents selected Riverbed to dramatically reduce bandwidth costs
• 33% of respondents selected Riverbed to consolidate and virtualize IT infrastructure and improve application performance

Why Riverbed over the competition: More speed, simplicity and scale
The top three reasons that respondents chose Riverbed over the competition were:

• Steelhead products deliver faster and better performance
• Steelhead products are easier to deploy and manage and
• Steelhead products offer broader support for application acceleration

Based on this, 87% of survey respondents said they would purchase Riverbed products again and recommend Riverbed to friends or colleagues.

Other considerations were pre-sales and support, range of features, scalability, product stability and the company’s position as the WDS market leader. Sixty-three percent of customers surveyed said they selected Riverbed over competitors like Cisco WAAS and Juniper WX/WXC due to ease-of- deployment and management. Fifty-four percent of Riverbed customers surveyed also said that the need to accelerate the mobile workforce was an important factor in selecting Riverbed over the competition.

Applications Accelerated: More than anybody
The customers surveyed are accelerating the broadest range of applications with Riverbed Steelhead products. The top ten applications that customers are accelerating with Riverbed products are:

• 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)

“Frequent customer feedback has been a key driver of our success and market leadership since we first shipped our products in 2004,” said Eric Wolford, senior vice president of marketing and business development, Riverbed Technology. “We always know where we’re going because our customers show us the way.”  

Riverbed Technology