Riverbed Technology, the company known for its Steelhead appliances, has made good on its alliance with Akamai Technologies, bringing both companies’ optimization technologies together for one big happy cloud-based optimization party. Wondering how this could benefit your data center? The VAR Guy will give you all the details you need to know …

Take a dash of Akamai’s Intelligent Platform and blend it with Riverbed’s existing WAN optimization technology, and suddenly, you’ve got yourself a brand new solution for optimizing SaaS solutions in the cloud: the Steelhead Cloud Accelerator. Riverbed and Akamai believe it will be especially helpful for companies that leverage many cloud technologies but need to reduce their network traffic, especially on time-wasting repeated requests for the same webpage.

But how does one deploy it? It’s so easy, The VAR Guy could do it blindfolded. It’s a subscription service that can be added to any Steelhead appliance already humming away in your data center. No configuration, no changes — simply download and install. According to Riverbed, enterprise corporations looking to leverage this for a multitude of SaaS technologies “… need only to deploy a single instance of the Steelhead Cloud Accelerator for each SaaS application to take advantage of the optimization.” And if you were wondering, yes, the solution is specially designed for Google Apps, Office 365 and even Salesforce.

When can the channel get their hands on it? Soon. According to Riverbed, the technology should be coming sometime at the end of Q1 2012. Our resident blogger sees potential in a product such as this. Making it easy to deploy and provision also makes it an easy feature checkpoint for VARs attacking the networking space. It’s also come at a perfect time, especially when off-site cloud solutions are being leveraged faster than ever.