Riverbed unveils AI-powered platform to optimise digital experiences

Riverbed has introduced the most advanced AI-powered observability platform to optimize digital experiences, and launched several new solutions and a unified agent built on this open architecture. Expanding on its broad collection of full-fidelity data across the IT landscape, Riverbed’s new observability capabilities now enable IT to overcome visibility blind spots around public cloud, Zero Trust and SD-WAN architectures, and remote work environments. Additionally, with Aternity Mobile, IT can now monitor enterprise-owned Apple iOS and Android mobile device performance to proactively identify digital experience issues and take targeted actions to improve the productivity of front-line employees. The Company also released the next generation of Riverbed IQ 2.0, an AIOps service that reduces alert fatigue and enables IT to identify and solve issues faster by using AI-driven correlation and automation of Riverbed and third-party data.

Today’s IT teams face the daunting task of delivering on the digital experience while managing complex IT environments and vast amounts of data and alerts without sufficient context or actionable insights. Additionally, this is compounded by network blind spots and a shortage of skilled IT resources. This presents a unique challenge that requires the ability to collect and analyze all this data, and leverage AI and automation to meet the needs of modern IT operations. Riverbed’s AI-powered platform collects data across the entire technology stack to ensure precise AI outcomes, ultimately reducing IT troubleshooting time and costs, and delivering better digital experiences for end-users.

“Customers are challenged with improving the digital experience, simplifying their management environment and implementing AI that works and scales,” said Dave Donatelli, Chief Executive Officer at Riverbed. “To address this, Riverbed has invested in our core competencies of data collection and AI, and today we’re launching the most advanced AI-powered observability platform to optimize digital experiences, along with solutions that provide new levels of visibility into network blind spots and enterprise-owned mobile devices. This is Riverbed’s largest product launch in years, and all of these solutions are available now. Great AI starts with great data, and our platform and visibility solutions provide IT with full-fidelity and real data that is the most comprehensive in the industry, along with an AIOps engine that uses AI automation to remediate issues faster, often without human intervention. At our core, Riverbed is focused on helping organizations improve their user’s digital experiences by using AI automation for the prevention, identification, and resolution of IT issues.”

Riverbed Platform – AI-Powered Observability to Optimize Digital Experiences

The new Riverbed Platform is open, simple, and smart, enabling IT organizations to collect, analyze and automate, and report on data, in order to deliver optimized digital experiences. The Riverbed Platform collects full-fidelity data spanning networks, IT infrastructure, applications, user experience, endpoints, and cloud; and as an open platform, is launching with approximately 35 pre-built application and software integrations. The Riverbed Platform applies the data, including third parties, into an AIOps engine for analysis and correlation, where root cause identification is determined, and automated remediations are launched. Reporting occurs using Riverbed dashboards, or through integration with IT Services Management tools such as ServiceNow. The Riverbed Platform includes a number of underlying technologies including:​

· The new Riverbed Unified Agent, which streamlines the deployment and management of visibility solutions with a single agent. The Unified Agent allows IT to add SaaS-delivered visibility modules – such as Aternity for end user experience monitoring and NPM+ for network and cloud monitoring – to collect more data without adding agents. The Riverbed Unified Agent comes with a powerful agent management tool.

· Riverbed Data Store, which consumes, analyzes, and reports on petabytes of data. The Data Store connects an organization’s data sources into an efficient data repository, giving enterprises just the right data at the right time. This patent-pending technology enables customers to benefit from Riverbed’s powerful data repository that makes AI actionable, without an enterprise needing to build their own, which is very difficult.

· Topology Viewer, for generating dynamic mapping of connected devices and showing dependencies within evolving and dynamic IT landscapes, putting data into context.

New Data Collection and Visibility Solutions include:

Riverbed Aternity Mobile is a first-of-its-kind mobile monitoring tool that increases employee productivity by enabling IT teams to proactively identify digital experience performance issues on enterprise-provided mobile devices, and take targeted remediation actions. There are an estimated 155 million new enterprise-owned mobile devices annually according to Gartner[1], and these devices are used for mission critical work by front-line employees across every industry. Aternity Mobile works on Apple iOS and Android across the most complete range of devices, and solves what was previously a major visibility gap on device performance and user experience.

Riverbed NPM+ is the first in a series of SaaS-delivered NPM services, with data collection accomplished by using Riverbed Unified Agent at the endpoint. An industry-first method, NPM+ overcomes traditional network blind spots created by remote work, public clouds, and encrypted architectures such as Zero Trust environments—extending packet visibility to network locations where monitoring was previously not possible. NPM+ is designed to collect decrypted data at every user and server endpoint (including Kubernetes), filling visibility gaps such as encrypted tunnels in Zero Trust architectures.

Riverbed NetProfiler, which delivers real-time visibility into network traffic and

application performance, now provides new capabilities to monitor SD-WAN health and performance, including for Cisco (Viptela) and VeloCloud SD-WAN.

Riverbed IQ 2.0 and Aternity Intelligent Service Desk

First introduced in 2022, the second-generation Riverbed IQ 2.0 is a SaaS-based AIOps service that uses AI-driven automation to contextualize and correlate real data across the IT landscape to prevent, identify and resolve issues quickly. Riverbed IQ 2.0 replicates and automates the best practices of IT experts to gather additional context, filter out noise, and set priorities—reducing alerts to only the most impactful. Riverbed IQ 2.0 leverages AIOps techniques such as the Riverbed Data Store and Topology Viewer, and uses Riverbed Automation to automate processes so IT can solve problems faster, often without human intervention.

The new Riverbed IQ 2.0 release takes advantage of expanded data collection sources, as well as an expanding library of 170 pre-built triggered Aternity remediations, application integrations and tools to create customized remediations. Additionally, custom tags and on-demand Automation allows IT organizations to immediately launch a remediation or schedule them to run at a pre-planned time.

Riverbed IQ 2.0 follows the recent launch of Aternity’s Intelligent Service Desk, which increases service desk and call center efficiency and availability. This new Aternity feature leverages AI and triggers workflows to automate and resolve common issues. Additionally, Aternity Intelligent Service Desk enables IT to understand end-user satisfaction through the integration of sentiment analysis across remediation workflows, from issue detection to resolution. The result is improved customer and user satisfaction for call centers and service desks.

“Organizations are racing to implement AI solutions and learning that successful AI outcomes are only possible with high-quality, trusted, and relevant data. The complex IT landscape, characterized by distributed infrastructures and hybrid work arrangements, also demands robust observability to ensure positive user digital experiences,” said Bob Laliberte, Principal Analyst at theCUBE Research. “Riverbed’s new AI-powered observability platform optimizes digital experiences by leveraging a unified agent, all of Riverbed's existing solutions, new network and mobile solutions, and second-generation AI technology with almost 200 automated responses out of the box. The platform offers an open architecture to support an ecosystem of partners, integrations, and the ingestion of third-party data. By leveraging Riverbed’s platform, organizations can reduce the complexity of supporting highly distributed environments to drive operational efficiency, deliver better digital experiences, and enable business growth.”