Riverbed Updates SteelCentral, Teams with Zscaler

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Riverbed Technology on Thursday rolled out a new and enhanced version of SteelCentral and said it’s teaming up with Zscaler to offer a joint solution.

The new SteelCentral release extends Digital Experience Management (DEM) capabilities from the end user back to the network; expands DevOps performance management; and advances network performance management (NPM) in big-data enterprises.

More specifically, the product upgrades extend DEM capabilities by:

• Creating a seamless link between the end-user experience and network performance management.
• Accelerating the DevOps application life cycle with improved container monitoring and enriched application-performance troubleshooting.
• Adapting to the big-data requirements brought on by digital transformation.
• Accelerating the transition to DEM with new Performance Command Center (PCC) for AWS and Azure.
• Delivering SteelCentral Aternity integration with ServiceNow to improve first call resolution.

“Many organizations do not understand how all the infrastructure, networks, apps cloud and end-user device elements of their environment impact end-user experience, while being tasked to become faster and more agile in delivering critical digital services to customers and employees,” said Mike Sargent, senior vice president and general manager of SteelCentral at Riverbed. “The latest release of SteelCentral furthers our vision in being able to provide the comprehensive visibility needed to optimize the performance of the entire digital-service chain and achieve business growth.”

Riverbed’s Erik Hille

Riverbed says digital transformation is underway at many organizations, noting that 48 percent of companies are using digital to create new revenue streams, in turn driving performance expectations.

“Companies are adding new customer-service initiatives, employee-service initiatives, and even partner-service initiatives in order to streamline efficiencies or create new revenue opportunities for the company,” Erik Hille, product marketing manager, SteelCentral, at Riverbed, told us. However, only 34 percent of companies don’t understand how well things are working from the employee or customer perspective.

With today’s release of SteelCentral, Riverbed’s goal is ensure the performance of digital services and optimize the end-user experience. There’s an opportunity for partners as well.

“We feel like this new release is opening up a lot of new opportunities for existing partners to advance what they’re doing in the network-performance management space, but also, in some cases, reposition around digital transformation, which is a major area of investment for a lot of companies,” added Hille.

Resellers who tend to focus on application-performance monitoring (APM) and NPM — sometimes separately, other times together, will benefit from …