Riverbed: New AI Solutions for Digital Experience
May 7, 2024 | 6:00 PM - 6:30 PM UTC

Join us for a deep dive into the fast-evolving world of digital experience management with Riverbed Technology CEO Dave Donatelli. During this “New AI Solutions for Digital Experience” exclusive interview, theCUBE will explore the latest advancements in observability and AI, unveiling Riverbed's innovative new platform that aims to reshape the industry. Learn how this open architecture, with its unified agent and AI-driven data store, empowers businesses to enhance digital experiences for both employees and customers.

David Donatelli
CEO Riverbed Technology
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>> Hello everyone. Welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto, California Studios. We've got a great news conversation around the fast changing observability AI space. Dave Donatelli, CEO of Riverbed is here in the studio. Dave, great to see you. Got some news here. Thanks for coming in.
David Donatelli

>> John, great to see as always.

>> So first of all, you take the helm at Riverbed and you got some big news dropping, a series of activities, platform and a bunch of products that's going to really kind of reshape the observability space as it's evolving, certainly with GenAI emerging. So excited to dig into that and get your perspective. But before we get into the news, what's going on with your customers around Riverbed? Give us a quick update.
David Donatelli

>> Sure. Well, our customers have a lot on their mind right now. They want to improve their end user experience for both their employees and their customers too. They're looking to simplify their environment. They want to reduce the amount of tools they have to make it easier to kind of deliver better experiences. And as you know, you can't have any conversation with that customer without talking about AI, its implications and how Riverbed plays. And fortunately, we have solutions across that whole spectrum. One other thing I'd add is around observability specifically is we see a lot of big organizations around the world now forming enterprise-wide efforts to look at this, whether it's for folks in the office or out of the office or frontline employees, wherever they are, around observability and improving experience for their employees.

>> I'm excited to talk about the news you guys are announcing because we've been following your career now at Riverbed. I won't say stealth opportunity, but there's new changes going on with Riverbed in the news here that's going to have an impact in the observability space, which as we know, there's a little bit of consolidation and massive change going on how customers are using it, hence the enterprise-wide, because it's impacting end user applications experiences. So this is not just a point solution anymore, it's really more of a platform thing. This is kind of the key of the industry. Give us a quick overview of the news and break it down and then we'll get into some of the impacts of what's the hard news.
David Donatelli

>> Okay, great. The hard news is we're introducing two major things today. First is an open platform that covers observability we mentioned, across the enterprise. And then from that open platform, we went ahead and released our first set of products from there. We think it's very exciting. One of the challenges we see with customers today is that as IT continues to evolve and expand, a whole bunch of new blind spots have come out, zero trust networks. Now people can't see what's happening or employees working from home and maybe connecting directly to the web not traversing corporate networks. This has presented a big challenge, right? What's going on? How do I prevent problems? How do I correct them when they happen? And that's what these products are meant to do. From a platform perspective, as I mentioned, it's an open platform and easy way to think about is this, we collect a lot of data, we analyze and we act on that data through AI automation and then we report what we did. So these simple things, collect data, analyze and action it, report on it.what our announcement is today is that platform, again, it's open in the sense that we also have open API. So customers can use not only Riverbed products with it, but other products they've already invested in to simplify their environment. And we made it easier to do things like more collection. So as an example, the platform we're announcing today has a single common agent, and with that common agent has modules that you can plug into within that agent, so again that you can collect more data, you need agents to collect data, and we all know people hate agents, but they also need the data. So the way to deal with that a platform that has an open agent with it, and that's what we've done. And then with the automate and analyze, we bought out our second generation data store for AI.

>> So tell me why they hate agents and why this platform is relevant then. You said they hate agents, they hate agents in the fact they have too many agents, or agents in general are not good? Explain more about that piece.
David Donatelli

>> I think it's both technical and political. And here's what I mean by that. Technically speaking, if you go talk to a large enterprise, they have 18, or more agents on any of their end user devices. Very painful to manage. You got to keep them up to date. Someone always wants a new agent. The political side of an agent is typically, the person who has to load the agent isn't the person who's actually using the technology at the end. So if you go tell someone and explain a product to say, That's great, I need that today.And then they say, Oh man, now I got to go talk to those guys and get in the queue to put an agent on. I don't have time for this. It's too hard to do.So by going to a single agent technology, we solve that problem for them, give them one agent, but then that one agent, through the modules that you can plug into, can do everything, from looking at an endpoint to looking at your network, all kinds of different things.

>> We'll get into AI agents that means down the road, but these agents are specifically around that network piece, getting that data coming in and out, right?
David Donatelli

>> Well a couple things there, firstly around endpoints like the laptop you have there. And then the second thing on the network side, as I mentioned, traditionally in the network, people were not using endpoints to collect network data. By having an agent on the endpoint, we have a product now called NPMNetwork Performance Plus. This is part of our announcement today. It really brings those agents now back to endpoints with a SaaS-based deployment. And that's important, John, because again, if you're working from home, if you're doing something in the cloud, if you're doing something, a zero trust network, the traditional solutions are blind to that. They can't see it. So again, we're bringing that data in and giving people the visibility they need to manage their environment.

>> This a visibility opportunity for your customer.
David Donatelli

>> Totally.

>> All right. Explain why the open architecture is important. You mentioned that earlier. What's the open architecture? And I'm assuming there's an ecosystem involved in it.
David Donatelli

>> Correct.

>> And how do you deal with say third party data? Because again, data becomes part of that.
David Donatelli

>> Right. So as I mentioned, we collect data we analyze and act upon it. And as I mentioned, customers are loaded with tools. One of my customers I talked to, they literally have dozens of tools trying to figure out visibility. It's too complex, it's too difficult for them to make that work. So what our platform does is consolidate a huge number of tools you would otherwise need. But at the same time, we recognize people don't want to rip and replace everything they have. So by making the platform open, we already have over 40 integrations of major products you would know in the marketplace. We can leverage the customer's investments they've already made, leverage that data because again, it's the customer's data, in order for them to see their enterprise better and make better decisions.

>> I love the unique agent aspect that's unifying agency essentially. Okay. Get rid of all your other agents with a master agent, whatever you want to call it. Unified agent is kind of what you guys call this, right?
David Donatelli

>> Yeah. Riverbed agent. Yep.

>> Riverbed agent. Okay. So think about how that enables AI. Everyone wants to know what's the AI strategy relative to this product because there's a tailwind for you that you guys walk into with this. Explain the AI impact.
David Donatelli

>> So the AI really gets into the analyze and automate part of the architecture we talked about. And about 18 months ago, we released a product called Riverbed IQ. And as part of today's announcement, we're releasing Riverbed IQ So the good news is look, we are not a PowerPoint player in AI. We actually have real products. They've been in the market, they're doing real things. And we did a lot of things that I'm very proud of the team. First of all, as you know, good AI comes from good, accurate data, right? We've already seen examples in the marketplace. If you're using simulated data, you can come up with some really not accurate answers. So we use real data 100of the time and we built this data store that can scale very high into petabytes. And why is that so important? Because I know from my background, I've been in data my entire career, it's extremely difficult for customers to build their own data repositories. There's a lot of challenges to do that and you need the data before you can even do the AI. So we've taken all that work out of the customer, we've built that repository, it scales very high. And then from that repository, we can analyze and correlate issues and then do automated remediations. And we already pre-built into this, released 170 automated remediations for common problems you'll see in your environment. We also give customers the ability to build their own remediations. We have some customers who built hundreds on top of this. Let me give you one example. We have a major company in Europe who uses our IQ product. And from that, one of the big challenges they saw were false positives. So think about it, you see this all the time, you're on a help desk, you're getting inundated all the time, alert, alert, alert. No one knows what to work on. Using the AI, they're able to eliminate 86of those alerts, so just ignore them. They thought at the time they're getting 2000 alerts a day, they were actually getting 2000 an hour. They didn't know that because they just couldn't get to them. So by eliminating all the noise, they got to the important ones and then they could automate resolution and improve customer satisfaction.

>> So one of the things observability people talking about is there's so many signals to monitor.
David Donatelli

>> Totally.

>> You mentioned that and how they've off by orders of magnitude, as the world gets more connected, there's going to be even more observability data points. People talk about full-stack observability, and then we have this wave of data coming in, more observability. Is AI going to help that? What is Riverbed's solution? Will this announcement address some of those things? So talk about the tsunami of data coming in. Is that the data store in combination with the engine of IQ or... Take us through that. Because the solution I got my agents there. Okay, great. I got rid of that unified agent. Now I have a tsunami of observability data points I need to monitor.
David Donatelli

>> Right. Well, the biggest challenge people have as I mentioned are just what you said, tsunami of data, false positives, right? I've got all this stuff, noise coming at me, what do I do? I don't have enough smart people to cover all this, so I need to get down to the ones that matter the most. And that's why the AI and the so important, because what it enables you to do is sort and correlate and figure out is this really a problem or not? Is this something I need to worry about or not? So it's this combination of one, ending blind spots by finding new ways to collect the data that people need to see that's relevant. And then two, by using machine learning and AI to sort through all that data to correlate and say, This is the problem.The big thing you hear from customers all the time is this term, I'm sure you hear it in here as well, mean time to innocence, right? I'm the networking guy. I need to figure out is this my problem or not? Or I'm the apps person, is this my problem or not? Or I'm the endpoint person. What we do is we do that in an automated fashion so people aren't sitting around finger pointing all

>> the correlation. Now you guys do cross-domain correlation and it everywhere, all across all domains?
David Donatelli

>> Yes.

>> Okay, that's table stakes pretty much for you guys?
David Donatelli

>> Yeah. And again, it's based on our background. We grew up knowing endpoints and we grew up knowing networking and we grew up knowing applications, so we could look at packets and flows and applications and again, laptops and desktops and everything else people have issues with, we can see and then correlate across.

>> Okay, so I'm a customer, I'll put my customer hat on. Dave, I know Riverbed, I got so many problems. My biggest problem is what data do I collect and do I get all the data? So data collection becomes a very big conversation. How do you answer that question?
David Donatelli

>> Yeah. The way we answer it, and this is the great thing about our architecture is you can start wherever you want. So we have some customers who start and say, Look, I've got this...I'll give you some real problems we face, Hey, I've got all these problems on my endpoints. People can't log in, they're mad, they're not using their apps. We have issues.Great, we have a product called Aternity. This is part of the architecture. Go apply Aternity.And what we see with customers is a very quick ROI on that. It solves that problem. But more importantly, it's not just a point or dead end product. Then they might say, Well gee, I have issues on my network.Great, add some of our network products, add those network products together.Then they say, Okay, great. Now, I know what's going on my network. I know what's going on my endpoint and now, I want to correlate across.Add IQ.And so think of it as like Legos, right? Take the pieces you want, put them together and then with the openness, connect the pieces that already own into that and that's the entire system that we're announcing today.

>> Tell me about Aternity mobile solution. You mentioned that. What's that targeted for, which industries, and who benefits the most from that?
David Donatelli

>> Okay, well think about it in your personal life. If you go anywhere today, I was driving down the street and they were doing some... PGA is always doing work in the neighborhood and they're out there on their endpoints, right? That's a mission-critical application. That's how their workers communicate, find out what they need to do and get things done. Go to any restaurant, what are people doing? They're on endpoints. Go to a hospital, your electronic medical record is done on a mobile endpoint. So these are mission-critical frontline applications for all these companies. Meaning if they're not working well, the company's not working well, they're not being efficient. But up until today, no one has had a solution for it. And this gets back to my point before about blind spots gathering data and acting on that data. So what Aternity mobile does is just that. So we cover iOS, we cover Android, we cover a broad set of devices. You can run that and now understand, am I having a problem? What's the problem? What should I go do to fix that problem, across very, very large scale.

>> So a user experience for your customers.
David Donatelli

>> Totally. It's very important product and it's something all our customers are looking for.

>> Yeah, no-brainer. Let's shift to AIOPs. You mentioned What specifically is in that that makes that second generation work? What's the big secret sauce in
David Donatelli

>> Yeah, what happens in 2.0 versus 1.0 is, it might sound kind of funny because we're talking about it, but it's more data sources in, more data covering more of your environment, gives you a better correlation, more accurate results. In addition to that, more pre-built automated resolutions. So we continue to build out more more problems that we can solve without human intervention. We have customers doing literally thousands of automated fixes per month, no human intervention. We report out to either our reporter, report that out to That's the kind of technology that IQ gives you. It's very, very popular. And the other thing we see around automation intervention, one other use case we haven't really talked about are like call centers. Very, very popular with our customers right now because either you have a help desk, right? Everybody's got help desk or you have a call center and the call center is either generating revenue for you, we're calling people to make money, or you're dealing with service calls and you're trying to keep your customers happy. As you're aware, most of those aren't in an office building anymore. They're at somebody's house, right? It's individuals working from their house. Well, you need to know if that's working, and everybody's house is different. Some people have great networking and some, great internet connections, some people don't. And by using that automation to understand is my call center being as efficient as it could be? Can I fix things automatically? These are all big difference makers for organizations.

>> So you took over Riverbed as CEO, obviously they have a huge install base, very big brand. I mean at one point, they were the king of-
David Donatelli

>> Still are.

>> Okay, still are and probably going to be bigger in this announcement. I want to ask you specifically to all the Riverbed customers out there, specifically, what's new? Okay, I got my Riverbed, it's working, it's in my environment. What should I pay attention to in this now? What should I know about this announcement that's going to make me stand up and either do more or change my configuration of doing more with Riverbed Install Base?
David Donatelli

>> Well for Install Base, look, we just made your life a lot easier. The great news is we carry forward all the investments you've already made in our products, but now, we have a SaaS-based offering that you can, again, use any entry points you want and build either a piece of it or all of it in one point in time in covering all your new issues you face, solving your problem around zero trust networks and cloud, solving your problems around mobility. It's all here in shipping today.

>> We've interviewed you theCUBE almost two dozen times. I think this is the 12th time you've been on theCUBE. You're a product guide and I know I can say this with certainty, you're also competitive and so I'm sure Riverbed customers are going to benefit, I appreciate your comment there, but let's talk about the new business. Someone's not a Riverbed customer, I mean, probably everyone pretty much has a Riverbed because their product leadership's well-known, but for the folks out that aren't working with you, why is this announcement important for them? Why should they take a look at Riverbed this particular thing and what's your message to that audience, I'd say this, humbly said, we've proven in the market that we the best technology in the marketplace. We the best ability to manage your endpoints. the best ability to most accurately understand what's happening in your network, and we've built that over 20 years. And with this announcement, we're giving you an open solution that covers the problems that you face. How do I provide a better experience? How do I deal with the complexity of IT? I'm a football fan and Tom Brady always said at the end of his career, he had the answers to the test, and I believe we've answered the test. We know what customers want by our interaction with them. And what we've delivered today is by listening to our customers very closely, I believe we very accurately delivered upon what they're asking for. And if you're not a customer, I'd say this, everybody will benefit from this technology, that sincerely. I don't mean that as some hype thing, right? If you're running an organization and you have all kinds of people spread out all over the world, you can benefit from this technology, give your organization a better experience, make your employees happier, and we give you a very, very fast ROI that we're happy to share with

>> You mentioned earlier at the top, people have too many tools. People are also looking for simplification. You're kind of addressing that with this announcement, this fatigue on products and vendors and security threats are more than ever before. Security is a big part of this observability equation. You mentioned also teams are forming enterprise wide, so we seem to be at this inflection point in an industry that you've seen all the waves of innovation. We are now at one now where it seems that's the nexus of all of them combined and add a hundred factor to it. So scope it out that way. Why is this time important, again, and why is this observability thing going from a point solution to an enterprise wide effort? Because it's not a magic quadrant anymore. Observability is native to everything, and so this seems to be what you're saying.
David Donatelli

>> Yes. That's what attracted me to Riverbed and as you said, I've been fortunate, I've been doing this probably longer than I'd like to admit, and I've seen the whole evolution of what's happened in enterprise. I spent my whole career in enterprise technology and I love it. I'm very passionate about it, and what I was really excited about Riverbed, when I first looked at I was like, they don't know what they have here, because there's a combination you said, what customers are looking for and what they need and what the technology is. And you can't do this stuff in five minutes. They've been 20 years and the largest, most critical applications in the world knowing how to scale to great heights, because remember, these things scale very, very large. You got to be able to scale in order to really meet customersneeds. And so that combination of where the market is and what it needs and what Riverbed had for fundamental technologies has all come together what we announced today, and I think it's going to make a big difference.

>> You've always been a product-led executive and you like product, and like you said, you're technical. Customers need to simplify their product portfolio as they install their own technology. What advice would you give them as they look at this next wave of re-architecting for the AI world? Because that's going to change the app, in the sense user experience is part of your announcement, having the blind spots filled, now you have full observability, if you will, what's that going to do on the app side and how does your customers change their behavior in terms of how they organize their teams, how they should think about their architecture? Is there any advice that you would give those folks out there to think about their product architecture in terms of like, okay, I got data centers turning into AI factories, I got clustered systems, now the new server, more horsepower, they're gearing up. At the same time, there's a data problem that they're solving, observability, data management, all changing, everything seems to be flipping the script. What advice would you give enterprise customers now as they want to build the bridge to the future, then cross it?
David Donatelli

>> Yeah. I think a lot of basic things that sometimes get lost in all this, always keep business impact at the forefront of what we're doing. As much as I love technology, these are businesses and large governments, they have a job to do and you got to always keep that in mind. What problem are we solving and how are we doing it? I think the second thing I keep in mind with everybody is be careful about fads and really look to make longer range decisions. You heard me talk about why I think the data store is so important and the reason why I do is because I think within a lot of companies, they're going to be like, Hey, we're just going to go build our own. We're going to make this work.And I remind people, go back to data oceans. Go back to data lakes. People struggled mightily with that.the reason why it it's not because they're not smart. It's because it's really hard. It is much harder than people think, and because of that, our technology in our industry, believe it or not, I would observe, if you're on the inside of it, it's much more evolutionary than revolutionary than people give credit for, meaning AI is not new. Machine learning has been around for a long, long time and people have been working on it for a long, long time. Now because the things you see in the consumer world, all of a sudden everybody to talk about it, it's all the rage. I get it, I think it's going to be hugely impactful. I think it's real. I'm not saying it's not real, but do some things that are tried and tested and true, and I'm a big believer of crawl, walk, run, get it working, do better, do better, always with business in mind. And I think if you follow those steps and you work with people who've got a lot of experience around AI, you'll do fine.

>> As Steve Jobs said, Don't take technology to looking for a problem, identify what you need to do.I would say also on the evolutionary, revolutionary thing, it might feel revolutionary. I mean, I think it's a revolution. I use the word all the time, but I think from a perspective of evolution, yeah, enterprise is hard, but look at the developer market. It's rabid right now. It's on fire and there's an appetite for AI because it's stoking the developer. Great. That's applications. The infrastructure is lagging because it's hard. You can't just flip a switch and say, Okay, we're now an AI enabled.There's so much in there. So I think step one is to simplify and step two is get the observability right, get the network right, get that done.
David Donatelli

>> Yeah, no, totally. I mean if you look at it, what people really want is give me my consumer life and my business life. Let me be a remote worker and let me have the same experience even I had when I was at my own office where I could just call a tech guy and everything would work. That's what everybody wants. Now, the reason why it hasn't happened yet is just what you said, it's challenging to get there. It does take time, but I think the steps are in place if people are willing to step back, look at the big picture, and then implement a program that you know where you're going to get to at the end point, but you take very measurable steps to get there. One other thing I'd say is people are smart and what they learned is what happened with the internet, and we were talking about it on our launch today, 52of the Fortune 500 from the year 2000 is gone, and a lot of that was caused by the internet. We had a lot of companies, we all know their names all went away because the internet made them obsolete. We had a lot of companies who pivoted more successful than ever, established brands, but they understood the technology and they pivoted successfully. They're doing great. Then as we know, we had a whole bunch of new companies that came out of nowhere and now are huge Fortune 500 companies on their own. I wholeheartedly believe AI is going to play out the same way. And again, what I mean by businesses being smart is they saw the same movie, and all the CEOs and boards are sitting around saying, I don't want to be the first category.I want to be someone who's in the middle who's going to be more successful than ever from this, and that's what we're building to help them do.

>> As we say theCUBE, if you're too out far front of the wave, you become driftwood. If you miss the wave, you miss the wave. You got to ride the wave, which is being pragmatic. That's the pivot.
David Donatelli

>> Exactly.

>> Okay, great to have you on. Real quick bumper sticker, the news for us, how would you put the news a bumper sticker on a car? How would you describe the relevance and the impact of you're announcing today?
David Donatelli

>> At Riverbed, we use AI to help automate the identification, the resolution of any issues they have across their environment, delivering a better end user experience.

>> Awesome. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing the news. Congratulations. Okay, Riverbed hot news announcement here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching
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