Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD) kicked off VMworld 2012 by announcing tighter integration between its software and virtual application delivery controller (ADC) Stingray Traffic Manager and VMware vFabric Application Director.

According to Venugopal Pai, Riverbed’s vice president of Alliances, the Stingray/vFabric integration will make it easier for customers and Riverbed channel partners to deliver applications in a simpler and more scalable manner. While vFabric provides hybrid cloud provisioning features, Stingray does software application acceleration. Combined, the idea is that Riverbed and VMware partners will be able to inject a higher level of automation into application blueprint creation for provisioning and scaling multitier applications so they are both faster and smarter in a hybrid cloud environment.

“From a channel partner perspective, what it allows partners to do is really deliver a solution for helping their customers and their clients really build an application-based solution for the cloud,” Pai told Talkin’ Cloud.

For channel partners already developing clouds or who have already deployed clouds for their enterprise customers, Stingray can help them get applications deployed quicker. Pai said it solves a pain point in which IT administrators and infrastructure architects are burdened with deploying applications and building in scalability features. Stingray takes over and automates the process.

Stingray and vFabric together make it easier to ensure performance requirements are met, Pai said.

In other Riverbed news, the vendor furthered its strategic partnership with VMware (NYSE: VMW) in the growing software-defined networks (SDN) space. Riverbed Cascade products now support VXLAN to provide its partners and customers with application-aware network performance management for software-defined network performance management. Additionally, Riverbed Steelhead Cloud Edition will be integrated with vCloud Director as a way to simplify deployment, configuration and management of WAN optimization-as-a-service for virtual data centers.

“This latest collaboration with Riverbed brings the needed visibility and performance to address the challenges associated with the next evolution of virtualization, and enables customers to embrace SDNs,” said Allwyn Sequeira, vice president and CTO of Networking and Security at VMware, in a prepared statement.